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ftfje Jfflenbenfjali Hectares, Cfjtrb «S>erie* 
Beltoereb at De^auto (Hntbersitp 



UNDERSTANDING 
THE SCRIPTURES 



BY 

FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 

Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church 




THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1917, by 
FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 



MAV 26 191/ 
©CI.A482732 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

Foreword 7 

I. Preliminary 9 

II. The Book of Life 32 

III. The Book of Humanity 54 

IV. The Book of God 77 

V. The Book of Christ 99 

VI. The Book of the Cross 121 



FOREWORD 

The Mendenhall Lectures, founded by 
Rev. Marmaduke H. Mendenhall, D.D., of 
the North Indiana Conference of the Meth- 
odist Episcopal Church, are delivered an- 
nually in De Pauw University to the public 
without any charge for admission. The ob- 
ject of the donor was "to found a perpetual 
lectureship on the evidences of the Divine 
Origin of Christianity and the inspiration 
and authority of the Holy Scriptures. The 
lecturers must be persons of high and wide 
repute, of broad and varied scholarship, who 
firmly adhere to the evangelical system of 
Christian faith. The selection of lecturers 
may be made from the world of Christian 
scholarship, without regard to denomina- 
tional divisions. Each course of lectures is 
to be published in book form by an eminent 
publishing house and sold at cost to the 
faculty and students of the University." 

Lectures previously published: 1913, The 

Bible and Life, Edwin Holt Hughes; 1914, 

The Literary Primacy of the Bible, George 

Peck Eckman. ^ -& ^ 

George R. Grose, 

President De Pauw University. 



CHAPTER I 
PRELIMINARY 

The problem as to the understanding of 
the Scriptures is with some no problem at all. 
All we have to do is to take the narratives at 
their face meaning. The Book is written in 
plain English, and all that is necessary for its 
comprehension is a knowledge of what the 
words mean. If we have any doubts, we can 
consult the dictionary. The plain man ought 
to have no difficulty in understanding the 
Bible. 

Nobody can deny the clearness of the Eng- 
lish of the Scriptures. Nevertheless, the 
plain man does have trouble. How far 
would the ordinary intelligence have to read 
from the first chapter of Genesis before find- 
ing itself in difficulties ? There are accounts 
of events utterly unlike anything which we 
see happening in the life around us, events 
which seem to us to contradict the course of 
nature's procedure. There are points of view 

9 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

foreign to our way of looking at things. 
More than that, there seem to be actual con- 
tradictions between various portions of the 
books. And, above all, the way of life 
marked out in the Book seems to lead off 
toward mystery. To save our lives we have 
to lose them. All the precepts of common 
sense seem set at defiance by some passages 
of the Book. How can we explain the hold 
of such a book on the world's life ? 

When once the problem of the under- 
standing of the Scriptures is raised, various 
solutions are offered, all of which contribute 
a measure of help, but most of which do not 
greatly get us ahead. For example, we are 
told that the Book is translated literature, 
and that if we could get back to the original 
narratives in the original languages, we 
would find our perplexities vanishing. 
There is no question that a knowledge of 
Greek and Hebrew does aid us in an under- 
standing of the Scriptures, but this aid 
commonly extends only to the meaning 
of particular words. One who knows 
enough of Greek or Hebrew to enter sym- 
pathetically into the life of which those lan- 
10 



PRELIMINARY 

guages were the expression is prepared to 
sense the scriptural atmosphere better than 
one who has not such equipment. Very few 
Scripture readers, however, are thus quali- 
fied to understand Greek and Hebrew. 
Very few ministers of the gospel are so 
trained as to be able to pass upon shades of 
meaning of Greek or Hebrew words against 
the judgment of those who teach these lan- 
guages in the schools. With graduation 
from theological school most ministers put 
Hebrew to one side; and many pay no 
further attention to Greek. Even a trained 
biblical student is very careful not to ques- 
tion the authority of the professional linguis- 
tic experts. Apart from sidelights upon the 
meaning of this or that passage, there is very 
little that the biblical student can get from 
Greek or Hebrew which is not available in 
important translations. We cannot solve 
the greater difficulties in biblical study by 
carrying our investigations back to the study 
of the original languages as such. The fact 
is that emphasis upon the importance of 
mastery of Greek and Hebrew for an in- 
sight into scriptural meanings rests largely 

11 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

upon a theory of literal inspiration of the bib- 
lical narratives. It requires only a cursory 
reading to see that the narratives in English 
cannot claim to be strictly inerrant, so that 
the upholder of inerrancy is driven to the 
position that the inerrancy is in the docu- 
ments as originally written. No doctrine of 
inerrancy, however, can explain away the 
puzzles which confront us, for example, in 
the accounts of the creation as given us in the 
early chapters of Genesis, or throw light 
upon the possibility of a soul's passing from 
moral death to life. 

Great help is promised us by those who 
maintain that the modern methods of critical 
biblical study give us the key to scriptural 
meanings. There is no doubt that many 
doors have been opened by critical methods. 
Now that the flurries of misunderstanding 
which attended the first application of such 
methods to biblical study have passed on, we 
see that some solid results have been gained. 
In so far as our difficulties arise from ques- 
tions of authorship and date of writing, the 
critical methods have brought much relief. 
12 



PRELIMINARY 

Even very orthodox biblicists no longer in- 
sist that it is necessary to oppose the teaching 
that the first five books of the Bible were 
written at different times and by different 
men. In fact, there is no reason to quarrel 
with the theory that many parts of these 
books are not merely anonymous, but are 
documents produced by the united effort of 
narrators and correlators reaching through 
generations — the narratives often being 
transmitted orally from fathers to sons. 
There is no reason for longer arguing against 
the claim that the book of Isaiah as it stands 
in our Scriptures is composed of documents 
written at widely separated periods. It is 
permissible even from the standpoint of 
orthodoxy to assign a late date to the book of 
Daniel. No harm is wrought when we insist 
that the book of Mark must have priority in 
date among the Gospels, and that Matthew 
and Luke are built in part from Mark as a 
foundation. It is not dangerous to face the 
facts which cause the prolonged debate over 
the authorship of the fourth Gospel. It is 
not heresy to teach that the dates of the epis- 
tles must be rearranged through the findings 

13 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

of modern scholarship. There is not only no 
danger in a hospitable attitude toward 
modern scholarship, but many difficulties 
disappear through adjusting ourselves to 
present-day methods. If contradictions ap- 
pear in a document hitherto considered a 
unit, the contradictions are at least measur- 
ably done away with when the document is 
seen to be a composite report from the points 
of view of different authors. The critical 
method has been of immense value in enforc- 
ing upon us that the scriptural books were 
written each with a distinctive intention, 
apart from the purpose to represent the facts 
in the method of a newspaper reporter or of 
a scientific investigator. In a sense many of 
the more important scriptural documents 
were of the nature of pamphlets or tracts for 
the times in which they were written. The 
author was combating a heresy, or supple- 
menting a previous statement which seemed 
to him to be inadequate, or seeking to adjust 
a religious conception to enlarging demands. 
The biblical writers are commentators on or 
interpreters of the truth which they conceive 
to be essential. 

14 



PRELIMINARY 

Making most generous allowances, how- 
ever, for the advantages of the critical meth- 
ods, we must use them with considerable care. 
Results like those suggested above seem to be 
well established, but there is always possi- 
bility of the critic's becoming a mere special- 
ist with the purely technical point of view. 
Suppose the critic holds so to the passion for 
analysis that for him analysis becomes every- 
thing. We may then have a single verse cut 
into three or four pieces, each assigned to a 
different author, the authors separated by 
long periods. Even if the older narratives 
are composite, the process of welding or com- 
pression was so thorough that detailed anal- 
yses are now out of the question. Apart 
from its broader contentions, the method of 
the critical school must be used tentatively 
and without dogmatism. Moreover, we must 
always remember that the critical student 
comes to his task with assumptions which are 
oftentimes more potent with him from his 
very blindness to their existence. Assump- 
tion in scientific investigation is inevitable. 
Suppose a critic to be markedly under the 
influence of some evolutionary hypothesis. 

15 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

Suppose him to believe that the formula 
which makes progress a movement from the 
simple to the complex can be traced in detail 
in the advance of society. He is prepared 
to believe that in practically every case the 
simple has preceded the complex. He will 
forthwith untangle the biblical narrative to 
get at the ideal evolutionary arrangement, 
ignoring the truth that except in the most 
general fashion progress cannot thus be 
traced. In the actual life of societies the 
progress, especially of ideas, is often from 
the complex to the simple. Many evolution- 
ists maintain that movement is now forward, 
now backward, now diagonal, and now by a 
"short cut"; but if the evolutionary critic 
sticks closely to his preconceived formula 
about progress as always from the simple to 
the complex, he can lead us astray. Again, 
almost all great prophetic announcements 
are ahead of their time. They seem out of 
place at the date of their first utterance — in- 
terruptions, interjections hard to fit into an 
orderly historic scheme. Or suppose the 
critic to be a student of the scientific school 
which will not allow for the play of any 
16 



PRELIMINARY 

forces excepting as they openly reveal them- 
selves, the school that will not allow for 
backgrounds of thought or for atmospheres 
which surround conceptions. Such a student 
is very apt to maintain, for example, that 
Paul knew only so much of the life of Jesus 
as he mentions in the epistles. Such a stu- 
dent cannot assume that Paul ever took any- 
thing for granted. We can see at once that 
a method so professedly exact as this may be 
dangerously out of touch with the human 
processes of the life of individuals and of 
societies. Or suppose still further that the 
biblical student holds a set of scientific as- 
sumptions which are extremely naturalistic; 
that is to say, suppose that he assumes that 
nothing has ever happened which in any way 
departs from the natural order. We have 
only to remind ourselves that the natural 
order of a particular time is the order as that 
time conceives it ; but it is manifestly hazard- 
ous to limit events in the world of matter to 
the scientific conceptions of any one day. To 
take a single illustration, the radical student 
of the life of Jesus of a generation ago cast 
out forthwith from the Gospel accounts 

17 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

everything which suggested the miraculous. 
The conceptions of the order of nature 
which obtained a generation ago did not 
allow even for works of healing of the sort 
recorded in the Gospels. At the present time 
radical biblical criticism makes considerable 
allowance for such works. Discovery of the 
power of mental suggestion and of the influ- 
ence of mind over body has opened the door 
to the return of some of the wonders wrought 
by Jesus to a place among historic facts. 
This does not mean that the radical student 
is any more friendly to miracles than before. 
We are not here raising the question of mir- 
acles as such, but we do insist that an assump- 
tion as to what the natural order may or may 
not allow can be fraught with peril in the 
hands of critical students of the Scriptures. 
We say again that while, in general, the 
larger contentions of the biblical school can 
be looked upon as established beyond reason- 
able doubt; and while, in general, the meth- 
ods of the school are productive of good, yet, 
because of the part that assumption plays in 
the fashioning of all critical tools, the as- 
sumptions must be scrutinized with all pos- 
18 



PRELIMINARY 

sible care. A good practical rule is to read 
widely from the critics, to accept what they 
generally agree upon, to hold very loosely 
anything that seems "striking" or "brilliant." 
This is a field in which originality must be 
discounted. There is so little check upon the 
imagination. 

It is but a step from the consideration of 
the critical methods in biblical study to that 
of the historical methods in the broader sense. 
Many students who are out of patience with 
the more narrowly critical processes main- 
tain that the broader historical methods are 
of vast value in biblical discussion. Here, 
again, we must admit the large measure of 
justice in the claim. We can see at once 
that the same reservations must be made as 
in the case of the critical methods. The 
assumptions play a determining part. If 
we are on our guard against any tricks 
that assumptions may play, we can 
eagerly expect the historical methods to aid 
us greatly. 

We have come to see that any revelation to 
be really a revelation must speak in the lan- 
guage of a particular time. But speaking in 

19 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

the language of a particular time implies at 
the outset very decided limitations. The 
prophets who arise to proclaim any kind of 
truth must clothe their ideas in the thought 
terms of a particular day and can accomplish 
their aims only as they succeed in leading 
the spiritual life of their day onward and up- 
ward. Such a prophet will accommodate 
himself to the mental and moral and religious 
limitations of the time in which he speaks. 
Only thus can he get a start. It is inevi- 
table, then, that along with the higher truth 
of his message there will appear the marks of 
the limitations of the mold in which the mes- 
sage is cast. The prophet must take what 
materials he finds at hand, and with these 
materials direct the people to something 
higher and better. Furthermore, in the 
successive stages through which the idea 
grows we must expect to find it affected 
by all the important factors which in any de- 
gree determine its unfolding. The first stage 
in understanding the Scriptures is to learn 
what a writer intended to say, what he meant 
for the people of his day. To do this we 
must rely upon the methods which we use in 
go 



PRELIMINARY 

any historical investigation. The Christian 
student of the Scriptures believes that the 
Bible contains eternal truths for all time, 
truths which are above time in their spiritual 
values. Even so, however, the truth must 
first be written for a particular time and 
that time the period in which the prophet 
lived. When the Christian speaks of the 
Scriptures as containing a revelation for 
all time, he refers to their essential spiritual 
value. The best way to make that essen- 
tial spiritual value effective for the after 
times is to sink it deep into the conscious- 
ness of a particular time. This gives it lev- 
erage, or focus for the outworking of its 
forces. No matter how limited the concep- 
tions in which the spiritual richness first took 
form, those conceptions can be understood 
by the students who look back through the 
ages, while the spiritual value itself shines out 
with perennial freshness. Paradoxical as it 
may sound, the truths which are of most 
value for all time are those which first get 
themselves most thoroughly into the thought 
and feeling of some one particular time. 
Let us look at the opening chapters of 
21 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

Genesis for illustration. The historical stu- 
dent points out to us that the science of the 
first chapters of Genesis is not peculiar to 
the Hebrew people, that substantially sim- 
ilar views of the stages through which crea- 
tion moved are to be found in the literatures 
of surrounding peoples. A well-known type 
of student would therefore seek at one stroke 
to bring the first chapters of Genesis down to 
the level of the scriptures of the neighbors of 
the Hebrews. He would then discount all 
these narratives alike by reference to modern 
astronomy, geology, and biology. But the 
difference between the Hebrew account and 
the other accounts lies in this, that in the 
Hebrew statement the science of a particular 
time is made the vehicle of eternally superb 
moral and spiritual conceptions concerning 
man and concerning man's relation to the 
Power that brought him into being. The 
worth of these conceptions even in that early 
statement few of us would be inclined to 
question. Assuming that any man or set of 
men became in the old days alive to the value 
of such religious ideas, how could they speak 
them forth except in the language of their 
22 



PRELIMINARY 

own day? They had to speak in their own 
tongue, and speaking in that tongue they 
had to use the thought terms expressed by 
that tongue. They accepted the science of 
their day as true, and they utilized that 
science for the sake of bodying forth the 
moral and spiritual insights to which they 
had attained. The inadequacy of early He- 
brew science and its likeness to Babylonian 
and Chaldean science do not invalidate the 
worth of the spiritual conceptions of Genesis. 
This ought to be apparent even to the pro- 
verbial wayfaring man. The loftiest spir- 
itual utterances are often clad in the poorest 
scientific draperies. Who would dare deny 
the worth of the great moral insights of 
Dante ? And who, on the other hand, would 
insist upon the lasting value of the science in 
which his deep penetrations are uttered? 
And so with Milton. Dr. W. F. Warren has 
shown the nature of the material universe as 
pictured in Milton's "Paradise Lost." In 
passing from heaven to hell one would de- 
scend from an upper to a lower region of a 
sphere, passing through openings at the cen- 
ters of other concentric spheres on the way 

23 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

down. Nothing more foreign to modern 
science can be imagined; yet we do not cast 
aside "Paradise Lost" because of the crudity 
of its view of the physical system. 

Assuming that the biblical prophets were 
to have any effect whatever, in what lan- 
guage could they speak except that of their 
own time? Their position was very similar 
to that of the modern preacher who uses pres- 
ent-day ideas of the physical universe as in- 
struments to proclaim moral and spiritual 
values. Nobody can claim that modern 
scientific theories are ultimate, and nobody 
can deny, on the other hand, that vast good is 
done in the utilization of these conceptions 
for high religious purposes. 

A minister once sought in a sermon on 
the marvels of man's constitution to enforce 
his conceptions by speaking of the instanta- 
neousness with which a message flashed to the 
brain through the nervous system is heeded 
and acted upon. He said that the touch of 
red-hot iron upon a finger tip makes a distur- 
bance which is instantly reported to the brain 
for action. A scientific hearer was infinitely 
disgusted. He said that all such distur- 



PRELIMINARY 

bances are acted upon in the spinal cord. He 
could see no value, therefore, even in the main 
point of the minister's sermon because of the 
minister's mistaken conception of nervous 
processes. I suppose very few of us know 
whether this scientific objection was well 
taken or not. Very few of us, however, 
would reject the entire sermon because of an 
erroneous illustration ; and yet sometimes all 
the essentials of the Scriptures are dis- 
counted because of flaws no more consequen- 
tial than that suggested in this illustration. 
The Scriptures aim to declare a certain 
idea of God, a certain idea of man, and a cer- 
tain idea of the relations between God and 
man. Those ideas are clothed in the gar- 
ments of successive ages. The change in the 
fashions and adequacy of the garments does 
not make worthless the living truth which the 
garments clothe. Jesus himself lived deeply 
in his own time and spoke his own language 
and worked through the thought terms which 
were part of the life of his time. Some bib- 
lical readers have been greatly disturbed in 
recent years by the discovery of the part 
which so-called apocalyptic thought-forms 

25 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

play in the teaching of Jesus. The fact is 
that these conceptions were the commonest 
element in all later Jewish thinking. Jesus 
could not have lived when he did without 
making apocalyptic terms the vehicle for his 
doctrines. We have come to see that the 

S manner of the coming of the kingdom of 
Jesus is not so important as the character of 

\ that kingdom. 

Not only must a prophet speak in the lan- 
guage of a definite time, but he must speak 
to men as he finds them. This being so, we 
must expect that revelations will in a sense 
be accommodated to the apprehension of the 
day of their utterance. The minds of men 
are in constant movement. If the prophet 
were to have before him minds altogether at 
a standstill, he might well despair of accom- 
plishing great results by his message. He 
would be forced to think of the intelligence 
of this day as a sort of vessel which he could 
fill with so much and no more. But whether 
the prophets have through the ages had any 
theoretic understanding of human intelli- 
gence as an organism or not, they have acted 
upon the assumption that they were dealing 
26 



PRELIMINARY 

with such organisms. So they have conceived 
of their truth as a seed cast into the ground, 
passing through successive stages. Jesus 
himself spoke of the kingdom of God as mov- 
ing out of the stage of the blade into that of 
the ear and finally into that of 'the full corn 
in the ear. This illustration is our warrant 
for insisting that in the enforcing of truth 
all manner of factors come into play and that 
the truth passes through successive epochs, 
some of which may seem to later believers 
very unpromising and unworthy. The test 
of the worth of an idea is not so much any 
opinion as to the unseemliness of the stages 
through which it has passed as it is the value 
of the idea when once it has come to ripe- 
ness. The test of the grain is its final value 
for food. The scriptural truths are to be 
judged by no other test than that of their 
worth for life. 

In the light of the teaching of Jesus him- 
self there is no reason why we should shrink 
from stating that the revelation of biblical 
truth is influenced by even the moral limita- 
tions of men. Jesus said that an important 
revelation to man was halted at an imperfect 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

stage because of the hardness of men's hearts. 
The Mosaic law of divorce was looked upon 
by Jesus as inadequate. The law repre- 
sented the best that could be done with hard- 
ened hearts. The author of the Practice of 
Christianity, a book published anonymously 
some years ago, has shown conclusively how 
the hardness of men's hearts limits any sort 
of moral and spiritual revelation. It will 
be remembered that William James in dis- 
cussing the openness of minds to truth di- 
vided men into the "tough-minded" and the 
"tender-minded." James was not thinking of 
moral distinctions: he was merely emphasiz- 
ing the fact that tough-minded men require a 
different order of intellectual approach than 
do the tender-minded. If we put into tough- 
mindedness the element of moral hardness 
and unresponsiveness which the prophet 
must meet, we can see how such an element 
would condition and limit the prophet. 

Again, Jesus said to his disciples that he 
had many things to say to them, but that they 
could not bear them at the time at which he 
spoke. Some revelations must wait for moral 
strength on the part of the people to whom 
28 



PRELIMINARY 

they are to come. Suppose, for example, 
in this year of our Lord 1917, some scientist 
should discover a method of touching off ex- 
plosives from a great distance by wireless 
telegraphy without the need of a specially 
prepared receiver at the end where the explo- 
sion is desired. Suppose it were possible for 
him simply to press a button and blow up all 
the ships of the British Navy, or all the stores 
of munitions in Germany. What would be 
the first duty of such an inventor? Very 
likely it would be his immediate duty to keep 
the secret closely locked in his own mind. If 
such a discovery were made known to Euro- 
pean combatants in their present temper, it 
is a question what would be left on earth at 
the end of the next twenty-four hours. With 
European minds in their present moral and 
spiritual plight it would not be safe to trust 
them with any such revelation. And this 
illustration has significance for more than 
the physical order ,of revelation. There are 
principles for individual and social conduct 
that may well be put into effect one hundred 
years from now. Men are not now morally 
fit to receive some revelations. All of which 
29 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

means that any revealing movement is a 
progressive movement in that it depends 
upon not merely the utterances of the reveal- 
ing mind, but upon the response of the receiv- 
ing mind. In the play back and forth be- 
tween giver and receiver all sorts of factors 
come into power. The study of the interplay 
of these factors is entirely worthy as an ob- 
ject of Christian research. We may well 
be thankful for any advance thus far made 
in such study and we may look for greater 
advances in the future. For example, the 
historic students thus far have put in most of 
their effort laying stress upon similarities be- 
tween the biblical conceptions and the con- 
ceptions of the peoples outside the current of 
biblical revelation. The work has been of 
great value. Nevertheless it would seem to 
be about time for larger emphasis on the dif- 
ferences between the biblical revelations and 
the conceptions outside. 

Still when all is said the mastery of histor- 
ical methods of study is but preliminary to 
the real understanding of the Scriptures. 
If we come close to the revealing movement 
itself, we find that before we get far into the 



PRELIMINARY 

stream there must be sympathetic responsive- 
ness to biblical teaching. The difficulties in 
understanding the Scriptures are, as of old, 
not so much of the intellect as they are of con- 
science and will — the difficulties, in a word, 
that arise from the hardness of men's hearts. 



81 



CHAPTER II 

THE BOOK OF LIFE 

The approaches to an understanding of 
the Scriptures which we suggested in the 
first chapter are those which have to do 
merely with intellectual investigation. Any 
student with normal intelligence can appre- 
ciate the methods and results of the critical 
scrutiny of the biblical documents, but will 
require something more for an adequate 
mastery of the scriptural revelations. There 
is need of sympathetic realization that the 
Book itself did not in any large degree come 
out of the exercise of the merely intellectual 
faculties. In the scriptural revelation we are 
dealing with a current of life which flowed 
for centuries through the minds of masses of 
people. To be sure of insight into the mean- 
ings of this revelation there must be an ap- 
proach to the Bible as a Book of Life in the 
sense that its teachings came out of life and 
that they were perennially used to play back 
into life. Its hold on life to-day can be ex- 
32 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

plained only by the fact that it was thus born 
out of life, and has its chief significance for 
the experiences of actual life. 

Even the most superficial perusal of the 
Scriptures shows that they came of practical 
contact with men and things. There is com- 
paratively little in the entire content of our 
Sacred Book to suggest the speculations of 
abstract philosophy. The writers deal with 
the concrete. They tell of men and of peo- 
ples who had to face facts and who achieved 
comprehensions and convictions through 
grappling with facts. There is about the 
Scriptures what some one has called a sort of 
"out-of-doors-ness." There is very little hint 
of withdrawal from the push and pressure of 
daily living. If the prophets ever withdrew 
to solitude, they did not retire to closets, but 
rather to deserts or to mountains. We must 
not allow our modern familiarity with book- 
making as an affair of library research and 
tranquil meditation in seclusion to mislead us 
into thinking that the Christian Bible was 
wrought out in similar fashion. The Book is 
full of the tingle and even the roar of the life 
out of which it was born. Jesus gathered up 
33 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

in a single sentence the process by which the 
scriptural revelation can be apprehended by 
man when he said, "He that doeth the will 
shall know of the truth." The entire scrip- 
tural unfolding is one vast commentary on 
this utterance of Jesus. 

It is impossible for us in this series of 
studies to attempt any detailed survey of the 
revealing movement of which our Scriptures 
are the outcome. It is important, however, 
that we should see clearly that the revelation 
came to those who opened themselves to the 
light in an obedient spirit. While it is not in 
accord with our modern knowledge of psy- 
chology to assort and divide human activities 
too sharply, it is nevertheless permissible to 
insist that the biblical revelation was in a 
sense primarily to the will. As Frederick 
W. Robertson used to say, obedience is the 
organ of spiritual knowledge. The first men 
to whom illuminations came evidently re- 
ceived these gifts out of some purity of inten- 
tion and moral excellence. These early 
leaders gathered others around them and set 
them on the path of determined striving 
toward a definite goal. As the idea of the 
34 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

seer or the prophet found general acceptance 
it gradually hardened into law, law meant for 
scrupulous observance. If a singer felt 
stirred to write a psalm, he voiced his expe- 
riences or his aspirations in the midst of a 
throbbing world. If a statesman drew a wide 
survey of God's dealings with the nations of 
the earth, he did so at some mighty crisis in 
Israel's relations to Egypt or Assyria or 
Babylon. When we reach New Testament 
times we find that even the Gospels seem to 
have been books struck out of immediate 
practical urgencies rather than composed 
tranquilly with a scholar's interest merely in 
doing a fine piece of professional work. The 
early Christians were anxious to hold the be- 
lievers to the strait and narrow way. To do 
this they repeated often the words of the 
Lord Jesus. When, however, the older 
members of the first circles began to fall 
away, the words were written down, not be- 
cause some scholar felt moved thus to im- 
prove his leisure, but because it was abso- 
lutely necessary to preserve the words. 
Moreover, conflicts were arising between the 
growing church and the forces of the world 

35 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

round about. Some scriptures were written 
to supply instruments with which to carry 
on the warfare. Always the fundamental 
aim was to keep the people acting accord- 
ing to the teachings which lay at the heart 
of the Christian system. The object of the 
biblical revelation was from the begin- 
ning just what it is to-day in the hands of 
Christian believers — the object of using the 
Scriptures as an instrument for practicing 
the Christian spirit into all the phases of 
life. 

We would by no means deny that there 
are imposing philosophies or, rather, hints 
toward such philosophies, in the Scriptures, 
but we insist that these did not come out of a 
purely philosophizing temper. They came 
as men tried to put into some form or order 
the understandings at which they had arrived 
as they wrestled with the tough facts of a 
world which they were trying to subject to 
the rule of their religion. As we have said 
in the previous chapter, the Scriptures bear 
scars of all such conflicts. The revelation 
was knocked into its shape in the rough-and- 
tumble of an attempt to convert the world. 
36 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

And this is not to claim for the Bible any dif- 
ference in method of creation from that 
which obtains in the shaping of any vitally 
effective piece of literature. The world- 
shaking conceptions have always been won 
in profound experience. This chapter is not 
written with the principles of the modern 
school of pragmatism as a guide, and yet 
pragmatism can be so stated as to phrase an 
essentially Christian doctrine that spiritual 
ideas result from spiritual practices and are 
of worth as they prove themselves aids in 
further experience. Take some of the ex- 
pressions of Paul. The fundamental fact in 
Paul's experience was his vision on the 
Damascus road and his determination to be 
obedient to that vision. To make his own 
view of the Christian religion attractive to 
those whom he was trying to win, it became 
necessary for him to speak in terms of the 
Judaism of his time. In fact, he could not 
have spoken in any other terms, though some 
of his reasonings seem to us to be remote 
from actual life. But when he left argu- 
ment and came back to experience he was 
most effective. His terribly compelling ut- 

37 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

terances are those which were born of driv- 
ing necessity. The theology started with the 
vision and unfolded in obedience to the 
vision, "What wilt thou have me to do?" 
Everywhere upon Paul's epistles there are 
the marks of practical compulsion. A letter 
was dispatched to convince stubborn Jews 
in Galatia or to persuade questioning Gen- 
tiles in Rome. Some of the profoundest 
phrasings of Pauline belief were uttered first 
as appeals for generous collections to starv- 
ing saints. 

The example of Paul as a receiver and 
giver of spiritual light is very significant. 
Even if we should make the largest allow- 
ances to the biblical critics who would cut 
down the number of epistles known to be 
genuinely Pauline, we would have enough 
left to make on our minds the impression 
of enormous personal activity. One passage 
does, indeed, tell us of a period of months of 
withdrawal for reflection in Arabia. For the 
most part, however, Paul's life was spent in 
ceaselessly going to and fro throughout the 
Roman empire ; even in the days of imprison- 
ment he seems to have been burdened with 
38 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

the administration of churches. It was out 
of such multifarious activities that the theol- 
ogy of Paul was born, and therein lies its 
value. No interpretation is likely to bring 
the separate deliverances into anything like 
formal, logical consistency. Very likely 
Paul was of a markedly logical frame of 
mind, but he did not attempt to rid his mes- 
sage of contradictions in detail. The unity 
and consistency are found in the funda- 
mental life purpose to get men to accept 
Jesus Christ as the Chosen of God. If Paul 
had ever heard that much of his theology 
might be out-dated with the passage of the 
years, he would probably have responded 
that he was perfectly willing that the instru- 
ment should be cast aside if it had served its 
spiritual purpose of bringing men to obe- 
dience to the law of God. 

It is not intended to make this a book of 
sermons or exhortations. We must say, 
however, that in a series of studies on how to 
understand the Scriptures stress must be laid 
upon the maxim that the Scriptures can be 
understood only by those who seek to recog- 
nize and obey the spirit of life breathing forth 

39 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

from the Scriptures. Nothing could be more 
hopeless than to attempt to get to the heart 
of Christian truth without attempting to 
build that truth into life. The formal reason- 
ings of the theologian are no doubt of value, 
but they throw little light upon the essentials 
of Christianity except as they deal with data 
which have been supplied by Christian expe- 
rience. It would, indeed, be well for any 
study of the Bible to begin with a recognition 
of the part played by distinctly scholarly re- 
search. We cannot go far, however, until 
we recognize that sympathy with Christian 
truth is necessary before we can come upon 
vital knowledge. And this, after all, is but 
the way we learn to understand any piece 
of life-literature. A vast amount of ma- 
terial is at hand in the form of commentaries 
upon the work of Shakespeare. We know 
much about the circumstances under which 
the plays of Shakespeare were written; 
we know somewhat of the sources from 
which Shakespeare drew his historical mate- 
rials; we are familiar with the chronology 
of the plays ; but all this is knowledge about 
Shakespeare. To know Shakespeare there 
40 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

must be something of a deliberate attempt to 
surrender sympathetically to the Shake- 
spearean point of view. We get "inside of" 
any classic work of literature only by this 
spirit of surrender. The aim of Shakespeare 
is simply to picture life as he sees it, but 
even to appreciate the picture men must 
enter into sympathy with the painter. The 
Scriptures aim not merely to paint life, 
but to quicken and reproduce life. How 
much more, then, is needed a surrender of the 
will before there can be adequate apprecia- 
tion of the Scriptures? If the Scriptures are 
the results primarily of will-activities, how 
can they finally be mastered except by minds 
quickened by doing the will revealed in the 
Scriptures? The book of Christianity must 
be interpreted by the disciples of Christian- 
ity. Judged merely by bookish standards, 
there is no satisfactory explanation of the 
power of the Bible. But lift the whole prob- 
lem out of the realm of books as such ! The 
glimpses into any high truth that are worth 
while — how do they come? They come out 
of experience. Even when they are repeated 
from one mind to another they become the 

41 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

property of that second mind only as they 
reproduce themselves in experience. Other- 
wise the whole transaction is of words, 
words, words. The Scriptures have to do 
with deeds, not words. 

All this is offensive to the dogmatic rea- 
soner. For him the intellect as such is the 
organ of religious truth. He insists on 
speaking of the Scriptures in formally theo- 
logical terms. That the Scripture writers 
employed theological terms there can be no 
doubt, but they did not speak as systematic 
theologians. And always they brought their 
theology to the test of actual life. The writer 
of these lines once knew a student who had 
read enough of psychology to enable him to 
reason himself into a belief that he was the 
only person in existence; that is to say, he 
declared that he himself was the only one of 
whose existence he was infallibly certain. 
Does not all knowledge of an external world 
come as a report through a sensation aroused 
by stimulus? If the appropriate stimulus 
could be kept up an external world might 
fall away and I would still think it was there. 
The bell might ring at the door and there 
42 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

might be nobody there. And so on and on, 
through steps familiar enough to the student 
of philosophy. When a friend made a quick 
appeal to life with the question : "If you are 
the only one alive, why do you bring your 
troubles to me?" the amateur philosopher 
came to earth with a sense of jar. But the 
jar is no greater than that when we pass from 
the plane of dogmatic theology to that of 
reading the Scriptures for their own sake. 
The old scholastics said that in God there 
are three substances, one essence, and two 
processions. How does this sound as com- 
pared with the statement of Jesus that he and 
his Father are one, and that he would send 
the Comforter? This is not to decry theol- 
ogy; but is nevertheless to discriminate be- 
tween theology and scripture. 

Some one will object, however, that the 
scriptural truths take their start in large part 
from the visions of mystics — of men who 
brood long and patiently until they behold 
realities not otherwise discernible. Some stu- 
dents will urge upon us that such mystic 
revelations are granted peculiarly to the 
mystic temperament as such, and that 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

they often come regardless of the quality 
of life that the seers themselves may be 
living. 

There have, indeed, been in all ages of the 
world temperaments of supernormal or ab- 
normal responsiveness to influences which 
seem to make little or no impression upon the 
ordinary mind. In all periods natures of 
this type have been looked upon as organs of 
religious revelation. So valuable have ab- 
normal experiences seemed that all manner 
of expedients have been utilized to beget un- 
usual mental states. A certain tribe of In- 
dians, for example, in the southwest of our 
country are accustomed at set times to send 
their religious leaders into the desert to find 
and partake of a peculiar plant which has an 
opiate or narcotic effect. In the belief of the 
Indians this plant opens the door to visions. 
The visions, as reported by those who have 
recovered from the influence of the narcotic, 
are not of any considerable value. Similar 
attempts have been made by hypnotic experi- 
menters among other peoples, the hypnosis 
sometimes being self -induced. From some 
Old Testament passages especially we may 
44 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

well believe that this sort of extraordinary 
mental condition was sought for in the so- 
called schools of the prophets in the olden 
days of Israel. The astonishing peculiarity 
about the Scriptures, however, is not that 
there is so much reliance on this trance expe- 
rience as that there is so little. The Hebrew 
Scriptures were the expression of a people 
living in the midst of heathen surroundings ; 
and heathenism always has laid stress upon 
the virtue of these abnormal experiences. 
Granting all allowances for mental states 
induced by eating an opiate, or by whirling 
like the dervish, or by fasting like the Hindu, 
the fact remains that in the main, the visions 
of the writers of our Scriptures came out of 
attempts to realize in conduct the moral will 
of God. When we think of the surroundings 
even of the early church; when we reflect 
upon the force of suggestion for uncritical 
minds ; when we consider the sway of super- 
stition at all periods during the Hebrew re- 
vealing movement, the wonder is that the 
Scriptures lay such stress as they do upon 
the type of vision which arises from faith- 
fulness in doing the revealed will. 

45 



UNDERSTAxNDING THE SCRIPTURES 

If we may characterize scriptural mysti- 
cism, it seems very much akin to mental abil- 
ities which we meet frequently in our ordi- 
nary intercourse. Take, for example, the 
prescience of a skilled business man. Nothing 
is more inadequate than the rules for suc- 
cess laid down by many a man who has 
himself succeeded in business. Mastery of 
his rules will not help another to win busi- 
ness success. The reason is that there comes 
out of prolonged business practice a keen 
sense of what is likely to happen in the 
industrial or financial world. The sharp- 
ened wits foresee without being able to assign 
reasons or grounds for the prophecies. So 
it is with intellects trained to any superior 
skill. The Duke of Wellington once re- 
marked that he had spent all his life wonder- 
ing what was on the other side of the hills in 
front of him, yet the Duke himself came to 
marvelous skill in guessing what was on the 
other side. There is also a variety of scien- 
tific mysticism, if such an expression may be 
permitted. The man long trained to the 
reading of scientific processes develops a 
quick insight which runs far ahead of reason 
46 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

or proof. The transcendent scientific dis- 
coveries have been glimpsed or, rather, 
sensed before they so reported themselves 
that they could be seized by formal proof. 
Now it is a far cry from business men, 
generals, and scientists to the mysticism of 
the Scriptures, but when we see the em- 
phasis which the Scriptures place upon con- 
stancy in keeping the law and in acting 
according to divine commandments, we can- 
not help feeling that biblical mysticism was 
and is an awareness developed as the life be- 
comes practiced to the doing of religious 
duty. Think too of the emphasis placed in 
the Scriptures upon the consecration of the 
whole life to the truth as cleansing the heart 
from evil. All this makes for a power to 
seize truth beyond that possible to formal and 
systematic reason. Mysticism of this sort is 
the very height of spiritual power. The 
Master's word: "Blessed are the pure in 
heart, for they shall see God," does not refer 
to merely negative virtue. It means also the 
power of soul accumulated in the positive 
doing of good. It means entrance into the 
life of quick spiritual awareness through the 

47 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

adjustment of the whole nature to the single 
moral purpose. 

In all promise of revelation the Scriptures 
insist upon the importance of keeping upon 
the basis of solid obedience. The finer the 
instrument is to be, the more massive must 
be the foundation. Professor Hocking, of 
Harvard University, has used a remarkable 
illustration to enforce this very conception. 
The scientific instrument, he says, which 
must be kept freest from distracting influ- 
ences so that it may make the finest registries 
must rest upon a foundation broad and deep. 
So the soul that is to catch the finest stir- 
rings of the divine must rest upon the solid- 
est stones of hard work for the moral pur- 
poses of the scriptural Kingdom. 

Still some one will insist that the Bible is 
a book built around great crises in human 
experience ; that it is a record of these crises ; 
that the people in whose history the crises 
occurred were a peculiar people, apparently 
arbitrarily chosen as a medium for religious 
world-instruction; that the crises cast sud- 
den bursts of intense light upon the meaning 
of human life, but that they themselves are 
48 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

far apart from ordinary experience. Here, 
again, we must insist that the scriptural 
stress is always upon obedience to what is 
conceived of as revealed truth. We have 
already said that Jesus regarded revelation 
as organic. In everything organic we find 
instances of quick crisis following long and 
slow periods of growth. The crisis or the 
climax of the sudden flowering-out would 
never be possible were it not for the antece- 
dent growth. The Hebrew nation, developed 
through workaday righteousness, manifested 
wonderful power in sudden crises. The 
inner forces of moral purpose which at times 
seemed hidden or dead because of the riot of 
wickedness suddenly blossomed forth in 
mighty bursts of prophecy ; but the all-essen- 
tial was the long-continued practice of right- 
eousness which made possible the sudden 
crisis ; and this is in keeping with the teach- 
ings of most commonplace human experi- 
ence. The daily struggle prepares for the 
sharp, quick strain or for the swift unfolding 
of a new moral purpose. There is nothing 
more arbitrary in the crises in the scriptural 
movement than in the ordinary ongoings of 

49 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

our lives. The student who has long been 
wrestling with a problem finds the solution 
instantaneously bursting upon him in the 
midst of untoward circumstances. The most 
insignificant trifle may finally turn the lock 
which opens to the glorious revelation after 
prolonged brooding. The daily practice may 
make men ready for the shock which leaps 
upon them altogether unexpected. 

We summarize by saying that the essen- 
tials of biblical truth came in progressive 
revelations to men who were putting forth 
their energies to live up to the largest ideals 
they could reach ; and that they sought these 
larger ideals for use in their lives. It must 
be understood in all that we have said about 
acting the revelation out into life that we 
do not mean merely the more matter-of- 
fact activities. It should be noticed that 
whenever men speak of will-activities they 
are apt to give the impression that they mean 
some putting forth of bodily energy. The 
will to do scriptural righteousness did not 
manifest itself merely in outside actions. It 
manifested itself just as thoroughly in bear- 
ings and attitudes of the inner spirit ; and the 
50 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

appeal was always to the will to hold itself 
fast in the direction of the highest life, what- 
ever the form of the activity. 

After this emphasis upon obedience as the 
organ of spiritual knowledge some one may 
ask what provision we are making for infalli- 
bility and for inspiration. We can only say 
that we are dealing with a Book which has 
come out of concrete life, and that in concrete 
life not much consideration is given to ab- 
stract infallibility. In daily experience the 
righteous soul becomes increasingly sure of 
itself. To return for the moment to Paul, 
we may think of the certainty with which he 
grasped the thought of the reward which 
would be his. The time of his departure, 
or, of his unmooring, was at hand. He 
was perfectly confident that he was to go 
on longer voyages of spiritual discovery and 
exploration. Can we say that this splendid 
outburst came from devotion to an abstract 
formula? Did it not, rather, spring from 
the sources of life within him — sources 
opened and developed by the experiences 
through which he passed? The biblical 
heroes wrought and suffered through living 

51 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

confidence in the forces which were bearing 
them on and up. They would have answered 
questions about abstract infallibility with em- 
phatic avowals as to the firmness of their own 
belief. In other words, they could have re- 
lied upon their life itself as its own best wit- 
ness to itself. They felt alive and ready to 
go whithersoever life might lead. 

And so with inspiration. It is the merest 
commonplace to repeat that the inspiration 
of the Scriptures must show itself in their 
power to inspire those who partake of their 
life. Does a fresh moral and spiritual air 
blow through them? Is there in them any- 
thing that men can breathe ? Anything upon 
which men can build themselves into moral 
strength? This is the final test of inspira- 
tion. Physical breathing is in itself a mys- 
tery, but we know when the air invigorates 
us. Abstract doctrine of inspiration apart 
from life and experience is a very stifling 
affair compared with inspiration conceived of 
as a breath of life. The scriptural doctrine is 
that the man who does the will finds himself 
able to breathe more deeply of the truth of 
God; and that the very breath itself will 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

satisfy him, and by satisfying him convince 
him that it is the breath of life. 

There is an old story of a student who de- 
cided to learn the meaning of a strange reli- 
gion which was taught and practiced by 
priests in a far-away corner of India. The 
student thought to disguise himself, to go 
close to the doors of the temple and to listen 
there for what he might overhear of the prin- 
ciples taught by the priests. One day he was 
detected and captured by the priests and 
made their slave. He was set to work per- 
forming to the utmost the duties for which 
the temple called. His response was at first 
rebellious. In the long years that followed 
the spell of the strange religion was cast upon 
him. He began to learn not as an outsider, 
not as one merely studying writings and rit- 
uals, but as one enthralled by the system 
itself. In this old story, inadequate as it is, 
we have a suggestion of the way in which the 
biblical revelation lays its spell upon man. 
The outside study is, indeed, worth much, 
but the true understanding comes inside the 
temple to him who carries forward the work 
of the temple. 



CHAPTER III 

THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

We have seen that the understanding of 
the Scriptures presupposes at least a sym- 
pathy with the rule of life contained in the 
Scriptures, and implies for its largest results 
a practical surrender to that rule of lif e. He 
that doeth the will revealed in the Scriptures 
cometh to a knowledge of the truth revealed 
in the Scriptures. We must next note that 
an understanding of the Bible cannot ad- 
vance far until it realizes the emphasis on the 
human values set before us in the scriptural 
books. We are to approach the distinctively 
religious teachings of the Bible somewhat 
later. It is now in order to call attention to 
the truth that the biblical movement is 
throughout the ages in the direction of in- 
creasing regard for the distinctively human. 
The human ideal is not so much absolutely 
stated as imposed in laws, in prophecies, in 
the policies of statesmen, in the types of ideal 
erected on high before the chosen people as 
54 



THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

worthy of supreme regard. And the place 
of the human ideal in the Bible helps deter- 
mine the place of the Bible in human life. 
Mankind makes much of the Book because 
the Book makes much of mankind. 

There is much obscurity about the be- 
ginnings of the laws of the Hebrews. One 
characteristic of those laws, however, is evi- 
dent from a very early date — the regard 
for human life as such and the aim to make 
human existence increasingly worth while. 
It is a common quality of primitive reli- 
gions that they are apt to lay stress on 
merely ceremonial cleansings, for example. 
The ceremony is gone through for the sake of 
pleasing a deity. There are abundant indica- 
tions of this same purpose in the ceremonies 
of the early Hebrews, but there is even more 
abundant indication that the ceremonies were 
aimed at a good result for the worshiper him- 
self. It is impossible to read through the 
Mosaic requirements concerning bodily 
cleanliness, the sanitary arrangements of the 
camps, the regulations for cooking the food, 
and the instructions for dealing with disease 
without feeling that there is a wide difference 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

between such requirements and merely 
formal ceremonials. The Mosaic sanitary 
law aimed at the good of the people. It 
sought to make men clean and decent and 
human. So it was also in many of the rules 
governing the daily work, the regulations as 
to the use of land, the prohibitions of usury, 
the relations of servants and masters — all 
these had back of them the driving force of 
an enlarging human ideal. The trend was 
away from everything unhuman and inhu- 
man. It is not necessary for us to remark 
upon the outbursts of the prophets against 
those who would put property interests above 
human interests. It is a matter of common- 
place that the call of the prophets was for 
larger devotion to a genuinely human ideal : 
that the fires of their wrath burned most 
fiercely against old-time monopolists who 
joined land to land till there was "no place," 
and against old-time corrupters of the law 
who sold the needy for a pair of shoes. 

Not only did the emphasis on the human 
ideal show in laws, but in the training up of 
types of life which should in themselves em- 
body and illustrate the conceptions of the 
56 



THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

biblical leaders. At the heart of the Chris- 
tian religion is incarnation, or divine revela- 
tion through the human organism. We are 
told that this incarnation came in the fullness 
of time. The passage seems to refer not 
merely to the rounding out of historic peri- 
ods, but also to the fashioning of an ideal of 
human character, and at least a partial reali- 
zation of that ideal in Hebrew heroes. If the 
final ideal was to stand incarnate before men, 
there must be approximations to that ideal 
before the crowning incarnation could be 
appreciated. We look upon the character of 
Jesus as the complete embodiment of human 
excellencies. Such a revelation, however, 
would have been futile if there had not pre- 
viously been glimpses of and anticipations 
of the ideal in the lives of those who were 
forerunners of Jesus. The Scriptures teach, 
or at least imply, that the life of a good man 
is in itself a transcendent value. 

And yet it is perfectly clear that while the 
Scriptures exalt the individual, they do not 
mean to wall individuals off in impenetrable 
circles by themselves. It is true that the indi- 
vidual is the end toward which the scriptural 
57 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

redemption and glorification aims, but indi- 
viduals find their own best selves not in isola- 
tion but in union with their fellows — a union 
of mutual cooperation and service, a union so 
close that the persons thus related come to be 
looked upon as a veritable Body of Christ, 
making together by their impact upon the 
world the same sort of revelation that the liv- 
ing Christ made in the days of his early life. 
The ideals as to the supremacy of human 
values are realized, according to the Scrip- 
tures, not in any separateness of individual 
existence, but in a closeness of social interde- 
pendence. So true is this that it is hardly 
possible to see how one can make much of the 
scriptural movement without immersing him- 
self in the stream of human life with highest 
regard for the values of that life. 

It has been insisted from the beginning 
that the Christian consciousness is the only 
adequate interpretation of the Scriptures. 
By Christian consciousness is meant not the 
consciousness of the body of believers who 
are together trying to serve Christ. The in- 
terpretation of the individual becomes final 
only as it is accepted by the mass of the be- 
58 



THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

lie vers. Something of worth-while thought 
is conceived of as going out from the life of 
every believer. The utterance of the seer is 
not conceived of as complete until even he 
who sits in the seat of the unlearned has said 
"Amen." The pronouncements which do not 
evoke this wide human response fall by the 
wayside. For example, how was the canon 
of the New Testament shaped? Was there 
a determination on the part of individual 
leaders that such and such books should be 
included in the volume of Scriptures ? Very 
likely there was at the last such deliberate 
selection, but before the final decision there 
must have been the practice of the congrega- 
tions which amounted in the end to the choice 
or rejection of sacred books. Very likely the 
New Testament Scriptures were collected 
by a process of trying out the reading of 
Epistles and Gospels and exhortations be- 
fore the congregations. As passages met or 
failed to meet the human needs, there was 
call for the repeated reading of some works 
and no call for the rereading of others. In 
use some documents proved their sacredness 
and other documents fell aside into disuse. 

59 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

Before the concluding deliberate choice was 
this selection in use by the believers them- 
selves; and the selection turned round the 
question as to whether or not the documents 
helped people. If each member of the body 
of believers is entitled to interpret biblical 
literature, interpretation becomes a com- 
posite and diversified activity. There is little 
warrant in the Scriptures for the notion that 
the biblical revelation is to level men to any 
sort of sameness. There are diversities of 
endowments and varieties of expression ; but 
the united judgment of the body of believers 
is the supreme authority in interpreting the 
scriptural revelation. This is what we mean 
by saying that the church is to interpret the 
Scriptures. We mean that no matter how 
brilliant or interesting the utterances of any 
individual may be, they are not of great value 
until they have received in some fashion the 
sanction of the main mass of believers. It is 
the function of the spokesmen of the church 
to gather up into distinct expression what 
may have been vaguely, but nevertheless 
really, in the thought or half -thought of the 
people. Gladstone once said that it is the 
60 



THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

business of the orator to send back upon his 
audience in showers what comes up to him 
from the audience in mist or clouds; so it is 
with the voice of a biblical truth through any 
medium of interpretation. The spokesman 
compresses or condenses into speech what has 
been dimly in the consciousness of the people. 
Even in days less democratic than ours this 
was abundantly true. It is the fashion to 
denounce some of the councils of the old 
church which shaped the creeds. It is often 
said that these creedal councils were moved 
by considerations of low-grade expediency. 
The councils, however, knew what the people 
were thinking of, and managed to get the 
popular thought into expression measurably 
satisfactory to the people themselves. 

In this doctrine of the church as inter- 
preter of scriptural truth we can be sure that 
the emphasis will remain on the elements 
which make for enlarging human life if the 
church keeps true to the spirit of the Bible 
itself. The aspirations of humanity, the 
longings of masses of men, find utterance in 
the great popular spiritual demands all the 
more effectively because such demands over- 

61 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

ride and nullify the insistence of an individ- 
ualistic point of view which might easily be- 
come selfish. We have said that this demo- 
cratic interpretation is final so long as it 
keeps itself in line with the biblical pur- 
pose. There are some dangers, however, 
against which we must be on our guard. 
First is the danger of identifying the church 
with those who actually belong to an organ- 
ization. When we think of the church we 
have in mind not merely formal organiza- 
tions, but all men who are really working in 
the spirit of the biblical ideals. There are 
many persons who really act according to the 
biblical revelation without technically uniting 
with a church. It may be that such persons 
do not accept the intellectual puttings of bib- 
lical doctrine, but that they nevertheless live 
in the spirit of that doctrine. It might be 
conceivably possible that a church organiza- 
tion would stand for an interpretation of 
truth which would be rejected by the general 
good sense of a larger community. In such 
a case the larger community would be the 
interpreter. Another danger in an interpret- 
ing body is that of traditionalism. The 
62 



THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

native conservatism of many minds stands 
against innovation. If, however, the inno- 
vation is in the direction of enlarging hu- 
man life, it will in the end win its way. A 
third danger is that of institutionalism, 
where the organization as such becomes 
an end in itself without regard to the 
human interests involved. The Master's 
fiercest condemnations were for those who 
put any institution before the fulfillment of 
the human ideals. In the parable of the good 
Samaritan it is noteworthy that it was the 
priest and the Levite who passed by on the 
other side. It is hard to resist the feeling 
that the Master implied that the priest and 
Levite had been institutionalized into a lack 
of humanity. Making allowance now for all 
these dangers against which believers must 
guard, the chances are that interpretation 
of a book so human as the Scriptures is not 
final until it has received the real, though not 
necessarily formal, sanction of the body of 
believers. 

So thoroughly does the biblical revelation 
turn around the supremacy of the distinc- 
tively human values that we must insist that 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

anything which would run counter to these 
values is alien to the spirit of the revelation, 
and, therefore, to comprehension of that 
revelation. We do not wish to be extreme, 
but it is hard to see how, in our day, for ex- 
ample, any who fail to put human rights in 
the first place can really master the scriptural 
revelation. We have spoken of the Master's 
rebukes of any form of institutionalism which 
stands in the way of human rights. Institu- 
tions at best are instruments; they exist 
merely for the purpose of bringing men 
to larger life; but these institutions some- 
times get petrified into custom and be- 
come glorified by long practice, and even 
made sacred by adherents who look upon 
them as ends in themselves. Then there is 
no recourse except to break the institutions 
in the name of larger human life. If we 
could put ourselves back in the times of 
Jesus and feel something of the sacredness 
with which the Jews regarded the Sabbath, 
we would know the tremendous force of the 
Master's daring when he declared that the 
Sabbath was made for man and not man for 
the Sabbath. The Master was also insistent 
64 



THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

upon the priority of human rights as over 
against property rights. It is perfectly true 
that Jesus did not encourage any propa- 
ganda for social reform. It is a mistake to 
try to read any form of modern Socialism 
into his teaching. Socialism is the theory 
of a particular time. Many of its outstand- 
ing features will no doubt one day be 
adopted; and the world will then move 
forward toward something else. Very likely 
three centuries from the present date the 
well- advanced communities of the world will 
be living under systems which will make So- 
cialism itself look like the most hopeless and 
reactionary conservatism. The scriptural 
revelation, however, has not to do with the 
details of any particular scheme. It aims, 
rather, at the setting on high of the human 
ideal, an ideal which will, if given a chance, 
work itself out into the concrete forms best 
suited to each age, and which will not have 
exhausted its vitality when all that is good in 
the programs of our particular day shall have 
been incorporated into social practice. 

But let us linger for a moment around the 
blighting effect of placing property rights in 

65 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

front of human rights. If anyone at this 
juncture becomes nervous and insists that we 
are likely to introduce the new-fangled no- 
tions of the present day into a discussion 
where they are out of place, let us remind 
such a one that the danger of putting the 
material before the spiritual has always been 
the chief stumbling stone in the path of the 
biblical revelation. It may be too much to 
say with the old version that the love of 
money is the root of all evil, but the Scrip- 
tures place the sin of greed in the forefront 
among the evils that block the revealing proc- 
ess. Jesus said, "It is easier for a camel to 
go through the eye of a needle, than for a 
rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." 
With God a morally miraculous redemption 
is entirely possible; but Jesus declares that 
there is no need of our trying to minimize the 
power of the present world to blind us to 
visions of the spiritual world. For many 
forms of wrongdoing the Master had a will- 
ingness to make allowances; for the sin of 
placing material desires above human welfare 
he had unsparing condemnation. In the day 
of Jesus the world had an opportunity such 
66 



THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

as it never had before confronted to learn 
spiritual truth. What manner of opposition 
was it which prevented that truth from run- 
ning its full course ? Largely the opposition 
of money interests. The Pharisees had need 
to keep alliance with the temporal powers. 
It is not without significance that Jesus was 
betrayed for money. It is not without sig- 
nificance too that Jesus's picture of the 
Judgment Scene concerns itself largely with 
the rewards for those who discharge the tasks 
of simple human kindness. It means much 
to find Jesus hinting at an unpardonable sin 
on the part of those who call deeds of human 
relief works of Beelzebub. It is certainly 
food for reflection that the fiercest condem- 
nations in his parables are for those who miss 
the human duties in their regard for the pos- 
sessions of this world. We repeat that we 
would not be extreme, but when we see the 
disregard of human life in modern industrial- 
ism; when we behold the attempts of prop- 
erty interests to get control of all channels 
for the shaping of public opinion; when we 
see rent, interest, and dividends more highly 
rated than men, women, and children, we 

67 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

cannot help feeling that the deeper penetra- 
tion into the Scriptures cannot arrive except 
through an emphasis upon fundamental hu- 
man rights so mighty that all institutional 
creations of industrialism or ecclesiasticism 
shall be put into the secondary place and 
strictly kept there. This is not railing 
against wealth. It is simply calling attention 
to the fact that the man who possesses the 
wealth-tool cannot be allowed to use it or 
even to brandish it in such fashion as to en- 
danger the unfolding of human ideals. It is 
only through the enforcing of these ideals 
that the Scriptures can be adequately appre- 
hended. Until a social kingdom of God 
comes on earth the light of revelation cannot 
shine in its full brightness. Any social 
preacher of larger human rights is working 
for the dawn of a new day of biblical under- 
standing. 

Some one will ask, however, why we single 
out one type of evil as especially thwarting 
the understanding of a biblical revelation. 
Why not speak of the evils of appetite and of 
envy and jealousy? The answer is that such 
evils, devastating as they are toward the spir- 
68 



THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

itual faculties, are so definitely personalized 
in individuals that their nature is quickly 
recognized. The difference is that under 
present organization the evils of material- 
ism are preeminently social. There is every- 
where the heartiest condemnation for the 
man who personally is conspicuously greedy. 
A social evil can manifest itself in outstand- 
ing startlingness in a single person, but 
the plain fact is that under modern indus- 
trial organization we are all caught in the 
same snare. We are all tarred with the 
same stick. Great as is the improvement of 
our present system over anything that has 
preceded it, nevertheless the distribution of 
this world's goods is so unequal that we walk 
in the presence of injustice on every hand. 
The poor man often does not receive the 
product of his own work. Large material 
prizes go to men who toil not. Now no one in 
particular is to blame for this social plight. 
Nobody has yet arisen to show us theway out. 
We cannot act except as we all act together; 
and it is doubtful even if one nation could 
act alone. If, however, we should all recog- 
nize the evils of the present system, if we 

69 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

should condemn the wrongs of that system 
instead of trying to justify them, we would 
be on much better spiritual ground, for the 
attempts to justify the system lead to uneasy 
consciences, and to the searing of those con- 
sciences, and to the softening down of harsh 
truths, and finally to an inability to see things 
as they are. Though we have come far along 
the path toward industrial justice, there is 
still very much in the system under which we 
live that makes for an inability to understand 
some of the most elementary phrasings of 
Christian truth. The only way out is to see 
the system as it is and to take such steps for- 
ward as can be taken now. Only thus can 
we keep our souls saved, and only thus also 
can we follow the flashes from above. 

Jesus preached the highest ideal for indi- 
vidual righteousness. Men are to strive to be 
perfect even as the Father in heaven is per- 
fect. But the perfection is to show itself in 
social impartiality in the use of material op- 
portunities. God sendeth the rain to fall and 
the sun to shine on the evil and the good. 
How many Christians of the present day 
could be safely intrusted with the distribu- 
70 



THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

tion of rainfall and sunshine? Those of us 
who dwell in lands that must be irrigated 
know that the type of Christianity that can 
be trusted to deal fairly with our irrigation 
system is somewhat unusual. 

We take the injustices of the present social 
order too much as a matter of course. We 
ought to see them as making against hu- 
manity, and therefore against the scriptural 
revelation. When these injustices culmi- 
nate in a war like the present, the only safety 
is thought that deals honestly with the inhu- 
manity of the war. Granted that war in self- 
defense is justifiable, we keep ourselves open 
to divine revelations only as we refuse to 
glorify the inhuman. Only that nation can 
succeed in war and remain open to revelation 
from above which recognizes the inhumanity 
of war and refuses to glorify it. 

Closely related to the blight of the spirit 
of this present world is the failure to perceive 
the need of missionary spirit for a full grasp 
of scriptural truth. Though the Bible was 
given to a peculiar people, self -centered and 
exclusive, it nevertheless abounds in sugges- 
tions that its content can be appreciated to 

71 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

the full only by those whose sympathies run 
out to men at the very ends of the earth. In 
the eyes of the Scriptures a human being is 
a human being anywhere. The differences 
between men are as nothing compared to 
the likenesses. Every revelation must begin 
somewhere and must attack its problems 
in proper sequence, one after the other; but 
mere priority of approach does not mean 
that one problem is inherently more impor- 
tant than another. Leaders among the Jews 
early tried to impress this upon the Jewish 
mind. Considered in its historical setting, 
the book of Jonah is one of the most spirit- 
ually daring books ever written. Jonah 
stands as a type of Jew who would not admit 
anything of worth in human beings outside 
of Judaism. Rather than carry the word of 
the Lord to Nineveh he would leave his 
country and go to Tarshish ; rather than turn 
back and resume the journey to Nineveh, he 
would consent to be cast overboard in a 
storm. Forced at last to deliver his message, 
he announced it with the grim satisfaction of 
expecting to see Nineveh destroyed. And 
the final text of the book is that Jonah must 
72 



THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

learn not merely to proclaim his message to 
the Ninevites, but to proclaim his message 
with sympathy and genuine human interest. 
The Jews were a long time learning the 
lesson, but not longer than other peoples have 
been. Just because of the human interest 
involved, the missionary impulse is neces- 
sary to a spiritual seizure of the biblical 
revelation. 

It is important that we keep the mission- 
ary motive on the right basis. It is true that 
the Scriptures will never be adequately ap- 
propriated until all kindreds and peoples and 
tongues bring their contributions. Some 
phases of the truth the Oriental mind must 
seize before the Occidental mind can be 
brought to appreciate them. When the final 
revelation comes it will be adapted to the 
understanding of any kindred under heaven. 
It is worth while to spread the Christian 
revelation for the sake of the return which 
the Christianized peoples will one day bring 
to our studies of the truth. But the 
better motive is deeper than this — the pas- 
sion for human beings as human beings. 
Any human being is entitled to any truth 

73 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

which another human being can reveal to 
him. 

The approach must be the human ap- 
proach. We must speedily get away from 
the Jonahlike conceptions of the biblical 
revelation as intended particularly for any 
one nation. One great danger from the pres- 
ent war is the loss by the religious nations 
involved of the ordinary New Testament 
point of view. Many of the fighting nations 
have lapsed back into the pre- Jonah era. 
But the present war aside, the thought of 
supreme truth as intended chiefly for a par- 
ticular race or nation, leads to a patronizing, 
condescending bearing toward other peoples 
which thwarts the finer spiritual achieve- 
ments. The contacts between the so-called 
higher and so-called lower nations in mili- 
tary, diplomatic, and commercial relations 
have thus far for the most part been abomi- 
nable. Too often missionary effort itself has 
based itself on these same assumptions of 
racial superiority. A people may indeed re- 
ceive blessings from the Scriptures in what- 
ever spirit they are bestowed, but damage is 
wrought in the souls of the bestowers by the 
74 



THE BOOK OF HUMANITY 

attitude of superiority. The only genuinely 
biblical approach is one of respect — respect 
for the peoples as peoples, respect which will 
have regard for their growing independence 
in spiritual development, respect which will 
not force upon them particularistic interpre- 
tations of the universal Scriptures. 

Now, all of this may seem like a long dis- 
tance from a treatment of understanding of 
the Scriptures in the ordinary sense. It 
would not have been worth while, however, to 
discuss this problem merely from the point 
of view of exegesis or professional commen- 
tary. The essentials about the Scriptures are 
their relations to life, their views of human 
beings and teachings concerning the forces 
of the spiritual kingdom. We shall proceed 
in the other chapters to speak of God, of the 
revelation of God in Christ, and of the spirit 
of Christ as revealed in his cross. Before we 
enter upon that study we must again remind 
ourselves that only life in harmony with the 
point of view of the Scriptures and only an 
interest in the same human problems that en- 
gross the attention of spiritual writers can 
avail us for vital interpretation of the teach- 

75 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

ings concerning the Divine, or make intelli- 
gible to us the hold of the Scriptures on the 
life of the world. The Bible is conceived in 
a spirit of respect for men. Only those who 
enter into that same spirit can hope to make 
much of the biblical revelation. 



76 



CHAPTER IV 
THE BOOK OF GOD 

We have remarked upon some points of 
view from which the student must start in 
order to reach a sound understanding of the 
Scriptures. It is time for us to ask ourselves, 
however, as to the dominant notes of the 
Scriptures which make the Book so dynamic. 
The purpose of this chapter is to show that 
the essentials of the Book are, after all, its 
teachings about God. The Bible is the Book 
of God. Due chiefly to the ideas about God 
are its uniqueness and its force. 

Before advancing to the consideration of 
the Bible as a book about God it will be well 
for us to glance for a moment at other 
grounds on which supremacy for the Scrip- 
tures is sometimes claimed. There are those 
who maintain that the value of the Bible lies 
in the wealth of information which it gives 
us concerning the first days of the world's 
life. The Bible helps us to regard sym- 
pathetically the view of the universe held 
77 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

by the ancient Hebrews. It is a repository 
of knowledge as to early science and phi- 
losophy. Now, all this is true, but relatively 
unimportant. Had it not been for the reli- 
gious teachings of which the old-time view 
of the world was the vehicle, that vehicle 
itself would long since have been forgotten. 
Only archaeologists are to-day greatly inter- 
ested in ancient theories of the world as such. 
There are, again, those who avow that the 
Bible deserves all praise because of the liter- 
ary excellence of its style. There are, indeed, 
sublime passages to be forever cherished as 
entitled by their very sublimity of expression 
to permanent place in the world's literature. 
All this we most gladly admit. Oratory like 
that of the book of Isaiah, some of the sen- 
tences of the patriarchs, passages from the 
Psalms or from the Sermon on the Mount, 
the parables, the thirteenth chapter of Paul's 
First Epistle to the Corinthians, are sure of 
permanency in literature no matter what 
may be anyone's opinion of their religious 
content. Nobility of conception is very apt 
to tend toward nobility of phrase. The ex- 
pression may be admired for its own sake 
78 



THE BOOK OF GOD 

apart from the substance ; but to say that the 
Bible holds its throne as the Book of books 
simply because of the superiority of its artis- 
tic form is woefully aside from the mark. 
Lamentable as it may be, masses of men do 
not rank artistic literary skill as highly as 
they ought. While a lofty idea is not likely 
to make its full impression until wrought into 
lofty beauty by a master of style, the worth 
must nevertheless inhere in the substance 
rather than in the form if the statement is to 
make lasting effect upon the passing genera- 
tions. Moreover, it is very easy to over- 
emphasize the literary excellence of the 
Scriptures. There are scores of passages 
which, as we say, "go through one," but this 
marvelous effectiveness is quite as likely to be 
lodged in the idea itself and in the associa- 
tions which that idea arouses as in the form 
of the passage. In some instances the liter- 
ary mold in the Authorized Version is such 
as to hinder rather than to help ; so that the 
prophet who seeks to add to the force of the 
idea breaks the mold for literary recasting. 

Still another may declare that the Scrip- 
tures are valuable because they abound in 

79 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

hints which make for practical success — 
shrewd moral maxims which aid all classes of 
men in avoiding pitfalls, axioms for daily 
conduct which ought to be accepted by every- 
body, even by those who care not for the reli- 
gion of the Bible. All this, again, is true, 
but hardly sufficient to explain the grip of 
the Bible on mankind. So far as the more 
conventional morality goes, men are likely to 
be ruled by the sentiment of the community 
in which they move. They adapt themselves 
to the demands of the situation at a partic- 
ular time rather than to a set of precepts. 

Still others maintain that the human ideal 
itself which we sketched in a previous chapter 
is the determining factor in giving the Bible 
power. The greatest study of mankind is 
man. The erection of such an ideal as that of 
the Scriptures for man cannot fail to secure 
for the Book mighty power through all the 
ages. And yet it must be replied that if we 
take the Bible merely as portraying a human 
ideal without reference to the idea of God 
involved in the same process of revelation, we 
cut asunder two things which properly be- 
long together. We must not forget that in 
80 



THE BOOK OF GOD 

the history of Israel the prophets grasped at 
every new insight concerning human char- 
acter as at the same time a new insight con- 
cerning the character of God. Attributing a 
profoundly moral trait to God made it of 
more consequence forthwith for man, and 
thus the conceptions of man and God went 
along together reenforcing each the other. 
To separate the ideal of God from the ideal 
of man leaves everything at loose ends for 
the human ideal. It is true that there are 
individuals here and there of intense intelli- 
gence and of immense wealth of moral en- 
dowment who do not seem to require any 
ideal of God to sustain and strengthen their 
ideal of man ; but for the most of us the ideal 
of man cannot grow to any considerable size 
without growth of our notion as to the char- 
acter of God. What man is now depends 
somewhat on our thought of where man came 
from, and what his place in the universe es- 
sentially is. One of our deepest yearnings is 
to know whether our exalted belief about 
man has any validity before the larger ranges 
of the activity of the universe itself. It is 
very common, for example, for those who go 

81 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

forth to social tasks with a passion for hu- 
manity to lose that passion if they do not 
keep alive a passion for God. Disappoint- 
ment with some phases of human nature 
itself and despair over the failures of men 
are apt to he so trying that the passion 
for humanity dies down unless familiarity 
with actual human life is reenf orced by com- 
munion with an ideal which reaches up 
toward the Divine. We would ourselves 
insist that the loftiest human ideal in all lit- 
erature is that of the Scriptures, but we must 
insist also that this ideal lacks driving force 
if it does not keep back of it the biblical doc- 
trine of God. 

From the very outset the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures deal with God. "In the beginning 
God," at the end God, and God at every 
step of the journey from the beginning to 
the end. There are other scriptures besides 
the Hebrew Scriptures that deal with God, 
but the kind of God set before us in the He- 
brew revelation gives the Bible its supreme 
merit. 

Since we often hear that there are other 
sources for the idea of God than the Scrip- 



THE BOOK OF GOD 

tures, it may be well for us to appraise the 
contributions from some of those sources be- 
fore we look at the kind of God drawn for 
us in the biblical writings. After allowing 
as high excellence as is possible to the theol- 
ogies obtained outside the Scriptures, the 
moral and spiritual superiority of the scrip- 
tural ideal shines forth unmistakably. 

Many a scientist tells us that we do not 
further need the biblical idea of God in view 
of the vast suggestions concerning the Divine 
which science places before us. The world in 
which we live has broadened immeasurably 
since the days of the Hebrew prophets and 
seers. The idea of God, broadening to corre- 
spond, has to expand so overwhelmingly that 
we ought no longer pay heed to the imagina- 
tions of the biblical writers. Large numbers 
of scientists to-day avow themselves devout 
theists. Materialism is decidedly out of 
fashion, and agnosticism is less in vogue than 
a decade or two ago. The reverent scientist 
affirms that he believes in a God whose om- 
niscience keeps track of every particle of 
matter in a universe whose spaces are meas- 
ured by billions of miles, a God whose omni- 

83 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

presence implies the interlacing of forces 
whose sweep and fineness seen through the 
telescope and microscope astonish us. More- 
over, the modern doctrine of evolution shows 
us that the entire material system is moving 
on and up from lower to higher forms. "It 
doth not yet appear what we shall be," but 
we shall clearly be something great and glori- 
ous. 

Now, far be it from us to belittle the 
splendor of this scientific vision. Modern 
scientific searchers are, indeed, finding in- 
numerable illustrations of the greatness of 
God. There is every reason why the scien- 
tific investigator should rejoice in a calling 
which enables him to think God's thoughts 
after him; but when a scientist will have it 
that his belief in God arises only from his 
technical investigations, we must declare our 
suspicion that he is employing his findings to 
confirm a faith already held, though that 
faith may be part of his unconscious spiritual 
possessions. Many times the scientist is de- 
termined that the scientific discoveries shall 
look in theistic directions just to satisfy the 
imperious though unconscious demands of 
84 



THE BOOK OF GOD 

his own soul. Some scientists are theists just 
because they are bound to be so, for the close 
contemplation of the entire situation in the 
material realm does not make for any ade- 
quate theistic verdict. It is hard indeed to 
believe that the nice adjustments of matter 
and force occur without the governance of a 
supervising intelligence. There are too 
many facts which suggest skill to make it 
easy to believe that the natural world is just 
the outcome of a fortuitous concourse of 
atoms. Science itself very likely establishes 
a presumption in favor of a governing 
mind, but the deeper question is as to the 
character of that mind. Is it a moral 
mind? At this point the hopeful evolu- 
tionist will break out that the progress is so 
definitely from lower to higher that no one 
ought to doubt the benevolence of the Power 
moving upward through all things. Evolu- 
tion is, indeed, full of promises to one who 
already trusts in the goodness of God; but 
the progress from lower to higher is not 
always unmistakable. Often the survival of 
the fittest is just a survival of those fittest 
to survive, and not the survival of those 

85 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

who ought to survive. There are too many 
things which survive which ought to be 
killed off. Simple good can give way to 
complex evil without at all violating the re- 
quirements of the evolutionistic formula. 
But even if we concede all that the scientist 
claims for his conception of God ; if we grant 
that terms like "omnipresence" and "omnis- 
cience" and "progress" clothe themselves 
with new force in the Copernican and New- 
tonian and Darwinian terminology, we must 
nevertheless insist that none of this rises to 
the moral height of the biblical teaching. 
Nor are we willing to admit that the biblical 
doctrine is to be discounted because it grew 
up amid small theories of the material uni- 
verse. The old Hebrew views of the physical 
system, outdated as they are now, are never- 
theless full of sublimity on their own ac- 
count. But even if they were infinitesimal 
as compared with the vast stretches of mod- 
ern scientific measurements, the moral 
grandeur of the idea of God of which they 
were the framework stands forth unmistak- 
ably. We must not permit the quantitative 
bigness of modern scientific notions to ob- 



THE BOOK OF GOD 

scure the qualitative fineness of the biblical 
ideal of God. 

Modern philosophy comes also and an- 
nounces that it has a better God than that of 
the Scriptures. The most imposing modern 
philosophical systems are those which pro- 
claim some form of idealism. The gist of the 
idealistic argument always is that the world 
itself is nothing apart from thought; that 
thought-relationships rule in and through all 
things; that there are no things-in-them- 
selves; that there can be no hard-and-fast 
stuff standing apart from God. Things 
must come within the range of thought or 
go out of existence. There is no alterna- 
tive. Now, thought implies a thinker, and 
this implication carries us at once to God. 
Here, again, we have no desire to question 
the cogency of the argument. We are 
ready to admit that this is the strongest 
theistic argument that has thus far been built. 
To be sure, there are some questions that 
inevitably suggest themselves: What is the 
thinker? Is it impersonal thought, as some 
have maintained? Is it just the sum of all 
forms of consciousness — our consciousnesses 

87 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

being organs or phases of the Supreme Con- 
sciousness? Or is the thinker strictly per- 
sonal, carrying on a thought-world by the 
power of his will and calling into existence 
finite thinkers in his own image? Assum- 
ing that the world is the expression of the 
thought of a Personal Thinker who acts in 
the forces of nature and creates men in his 
own image, the further question arises as to 
the character of that Thinker. While re- 
turning the heartiest thanks to the idealist 
for his argument — full as it is of aid for the 
Christian system — we have to protest that 
the argument does not lift us to the full height 
of the ideal of God inculcated in the Scrip- 
tures. And if this is true of the majestic 
systems of idealism, how much more is it 
true of the other and less convincing systems 
which are just now having their day! We 
have already spoken of pragmatism as pos- 
sessing validity as a method, but pragmatism 
can hardly cherish pretension of being itself 
a system of religious philosophy. 

Some very strenuous searchers after divine 
treasures have professed to discover value in 
various non- Christian religions. They have 
88 



THE BOOK OF GOD 

patiently studied the great Indian world- 
views, for example, which are admittedly the 
most important religious creations outside 
of Christianity. These students come back 
to us with fragments of doctrines, gems of 
ethical wisdom, traces of sublimity from the 
Indian sacred books. It would be foolhardy 
not to receive any genuine treasures, no 
matter what the mine from which they have 
been quarried. We are all eager to admit the 
immeasurable possibilities of the Oriental 
type of thinking for the development of 
Christianity, but Oriental systems thus far 
have been chiefly significant as indicating 
what stupendous religious powers can do 
when they are off the track. The Indian sys- 
tems of religion have run loose in India. As 
a result, nowhere in the world has religion 
been taken more seriously and more sincerely 
than by the Indian peoples. It is simply im- 
possible to bring the charge against the In- 
dian races that they have not made the most 
of their religion. The final indictment to be 
passed upon the Indian systems is that while 
the Indian peoples have made the most of 
those systems, the systems have made least of 

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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

the Indian peoples; and this because of the 
defects in the conception of the Divine itself. 
It is doubtful whether the Indian could call 
his highest gods personal. If he declares 
them personal, he can hardly make them 
moral in the full sense ; that is to say, in the 
sense of exerting their force on the world in 
favor of justice and righteousness and love. 
Now, it is just in the quality of moral force 
that the God of the Scriptures shows his 
superiority. The entire revealing process 
can be looked upon as one long story of the 
moralization of the idea of God. Let it be 
granted that the biblical idea was at the be- 
ginning marked by the naive and the crude. 
Personally, we have never been able to see 
the pertinency of the reasonings which make 
the Hebrew Jehovah as imperfect as some 
students would have us believe. Neverthe- 
less, for the sake of the argument we will ad- 
mit limitations in the early Hebrew concep- 
tion of God. Even with such concession, 
however, the outstanding characteristics of 
that God were from the beginning moral. 
Suppose that Jehovah was at the beginning 
just a tribal Deity. The difference between 
90 



THE BOOK OF GOD 

Jehovah and other tribal deities was that the 
commandments which were conceived of as 
coming from him looked in the direction of 
increasing moral life for the people, and these 
moral demands upon the chosen people were 
conceived of as arising out of the nature of 
Jehovah himself. To be sure, the early nar- 
ratives employ expressions like "the jealousy 
of God," but even a slightly sympathetic 
reading of the Scriptures indicates that the 
jealousy was directed against whatever 
would harm human life. In the mighty pic- 
tures of the patriarchs the heroes speak to 
their God as if the same moral obligations 
rested upon God as upon themselves. There 
is nothing finer in the Old Testament than 
Abraham's challenge, "Shall not the Judge 
of all the earth do right?" 

We are not specially interested in the 
growth of the ideas as to the power of God, 
though we repeat that it is difficult for us to 
believe that the early Hebrews thought of 
their Deity as so narrowly limited in power 
as some modern students seek to prove. The 
conception of the might of Jehovah grew 
through the centuries and followed upon the 

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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

extension of the knowledge of the Hebrews 
about the world in which they lived. If to- 
morrow morning some revolutionary astro- 
nomical discovery should convince us that the 
solar system is much vaster than we have ever 
imagined, the theist would, of course, extend 
the thought of the sway of God to all that 
solar system. If there were some method of 
becoming aware that the bodies of the entire 
astronomical system are millions of times 
more numerous than scientists ever have 
dreamed, the theist would, of course, main- 
tain that the righteous purpose of his God 
reaches to all of these bodies. The growth of 
the Hebrew idea was somewhat parallel to 
this. Even when the Hebrew thought of the 
outside peoples as having gods of their own ; 
he believed that as soon as his God came into 
conflict with the other gods, he would shatter 
them with his might. By the time the first 
chapters of Genesis were written the Hebrew 
conceived of God as creator of all things, and 
thereafter the growth of the belief in the 
power of God kept pace with the enlarging 
view of the world. 

We repeat that we are not much concerned 



THE BOOK OF GOD 

with the growth of the idea of the power 
of God. We are, however, interested in the 
manifest teaching or direct implication of 
the Scriptures that from the beginning the 
Hebrews thought of God as under obligation 
to use his power for moral ends. What the 
moral ends were depended upon the growth 
of the moral ideal. At the very beginning 
it was believed that since God had chosen 
the people of Israel to be his people, he 
must fight their battles for them. It is 
from this point of view that we must deal 
with the early idea of God as a God of 
battles. God was wielding his force for a 
moral purpose. Moreover, if God had 
chosen a people to be the channel through 
which he was to reveal himself to the world, 
he must be very patient with that people. 
How sublime is the Old Testament belief in 
the patience of God toward Israel! To use 
the phrase of our later days, God accommo- 
dated himself to the progress which the 
people could make. When the prophets 
called upon the people to walk with God, 
they implied a willingness on God's part to 
walk with the people. If they must lengthen 

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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

their stride, he must shorten his; he must 
bear with them in their inadequate notions; 
he must judge their efforts by the direction 
in which they were tending rather than by 
any achievement in itself. 

It is from the point of view of their grow- 
ing apprehension of God as moral that we 
can best understand the ferocity of the 
Israelite toward the so-called heathen peo- 
ples. The boasting of the Israelites over the 
slaughter of outsiders must be understood 
from the faith in the moral destiny which the 
prophets conceived the God of Israel to hold 
in store for his people. The reason assigned 
for cruelties and warfares upon heathen peo- 
ples was the abominations practiced by those 
peoples. Of course it is possible for a stu- 
dent obsessed with the modern doctrine of 
the economic determinism of history to say 
that we have in the story of the Hebrew de- 
velopment just the play of economic forces 
with moral aims assigned as their formal 
justification. Assuming that the narratives 
of the conquest of Canaan are true, what the 
Hebrews desired — these economists tell us — 
was the milk and the honey. They made 



THE BOOK OF GOD 

their so-called advance in obedience to God 
an excuse for taking possession of the milk 
and the honey. Now, he would be blind in- 
deed who would deny that economic values 
do play their part in wars of conquest; he 
would be foolish who would deny that wars 
always do justify themselves by appealing 
to lofty religious motives, but nevertheless 
the impact of the Hebrew history upon the 
life of the world has been a moral impact, 
due to the belief of the Hebrews that they 
were instruments in the hands of a moral 
God. If we could behold the abominations 
in heathenism upon which the old prophets 
looked, we would sympathize quite readily 
with an impulse which might seem to call for 
outright destruction. A friend of mine, a 
man of the most sensitive Christian feeling, 
once stood on the banks of the Ganges and 
watched people by the hundreds and thou- 
sands going through religious ceremonials, 
some of which were defiling and others silly. 
In the midst of the reeking vileness of one 
scene in particular he said that he felt for the 
moment an impulse like that of the old 
prophets to cry out for the destruction of the 

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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

entire mass. The situation seemed so dread- 
ful and so hopeless! All this passed in an 
instant to the loftier feeling of compassion, 
but the stirring of the more primitive im- 
pulse was really moral in its foundation. 
In any case, the old Hebrew notion was of a 
God who would put a growing moral ideal in 
the first place. 

It is not necessary for us to attempt to 
trace the steps of the growth of the moral 
ideal for God. As we have said, that ideal 
kept pace with the growth of the ideal for 
man. We must call attention, however, to 
the fact that the growth of the ideal was in 
the direction of increasing emphasis upon the 
responsibilities that go with power. The He- 
brew may not have definitely phrased the re- 
sponsibility, but he nevertheless shows his 
increasing realization of the obligations rest- 
ing upon God. When we reach the later 
prophets we discern that his moral obliga- 
tion upon God himself becomes more and 
more a determining factor. There appear 
glimpses of belief that God must not only 
fight for his people, but that he must suffer in 
their sufferings. It is of little consequence 
96 



THE BOOK OF GOD 

for our present purpose whether the suffer- 
ing servant of Jehovah of the later Israel- 
itish Scriptures is a group of persons or an 
individual. The implication is that the suf- 
fering is a revelation of Jehovah himself. 
Moreover, there appears a widening stream 
of emphasis on the tenderness of God's care 
for his people. The Hebrew writers com- 
paratively early broke away from the 
thought of God as merely philanthropically 
inclined toward Israel. They did not think 
of him as bestowing gifts which were with- 
out cost to himself. They show him as 
deeply involved in the life of the nation and 
as caring for his people with an infinite com- 
passion. This enlarging revelation was made 
clear to the people through the utterances of 
prophets, the decrees of lawgivers, the songs 
of psalmists, the interpretations of historians, 
and the warnings of statesmen. Slowly and 
surely, moreover, the people attained grasp 
on the doctrine that the greatest revelation of 
God is the revelation in human character 
itself. They began to look forward to the 
coming of one who would in himself embody 
the noblest and best in the divine life, who 

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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

would gather up in himself all the ideals and 
purposes toward which the law and the 
prophets had looked. New Testament 
revelation as such we leave to the later 
chapters, but we have come far enough, we 
think, to warrant us in saying that only he 
can understand the Scriptures who sees that 
the chief fact about the Scriptures is the em- 
phasis on the moral nature of God. Other 
Scriptures besides that of the Hebrews — we 
might say scientific, philosophical, extra- 
Christian Scriptures — have stood for the ex- 
istence of God; but none have stood for the 
existence of such a God as the God of the 
Bible. The salient feature of the Bible is its 
thought of God. 



98 



CHAPTER V 

THE BOOK OF CHRIST 

It is of course the merest commonplace 
to say that the revelation of God in the Scrip- 
tures comes to its climax in Christ. The 
revelation in Christ gathers up all that is 
loftiest in the utterances of the Old Testa- 
ment and gives it embodiment in a human 
life. It is legitimate to declare that there is 
little either in the teaching of Christ or in 
his character that is not at least foreshadowed 
in the Old Testament. The uniqueness of 
the Christ revelation consists in the manner 
in which the separate streams of truth of the 
law and the prophets and the seers and the 
poets are merged together in the Christ 
teaching, and in the fine balance with which 
the ideal characteristics seen from afar by 
the saints of the older day were realized in 
the living Christ. We might justly say that 
a devout reader of the Old Testament could 
find rich elements of the Christ revelation 
even if he should never see a page of the New 

99 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

Testament. The virtue of the New Testa- 
ment, however, is that all the elements re- 
vealed throughout the course of the historic 
periods of Israel's career are bound to- 
gether in the life and character of Christ. It 
is no mere epigram to say that if the greatest 
fact about the Scriptures is God, the greatest 
fact about God is Christ. Any thorough 
study of the Scriptures must revolve around 
Christ as its center. If the Scriptures mean 
anything, they mean that in Christ we see 
God. Of course it is open to the skeptic to 
reply that in all this the Scriptures are com- 
pletely mistaken; but he cannot maintain 
that this is not what the Scriptures mean. 
The Book comes to its climax with an honest 
conviction that Christ is the consummate 
revelation of God. The day when men could 
charge any sort of manipulation of the mate- 
rial by Scripture writers for unworthy doc- 
trinal purposes is past. We have in another 
connection said that each of the New Testa- 
ment books was, indeed, written with a defi- 
nite aim, but this does not mean that facts and 
teachings were twisted out of their legitimate 
significance. That Christ is the supreme gift 
100 



THE BOOK OF CHRIST 

of God to men is so thoroughly built into the 
biblical revelation that there is no digging 
that idea out without wrecking the entire 
revelation itself. To maintain anything else 
would be to do violence to the entire scrip- 
tural teaching. The burden of the entire 
New Testament is that God is like Christ. 

This may seem to some to be a reversal of 
present-day approach to the study of the 
Christ. We may appear to be attacking the 
problem from the divine angle rather than 
from the human. Why not ask what Christ 
was rather than what God is? It is indeed 
far from our purpose to minimize the rich 
significance of the humanity of Jesus, but 
we are trying now to get the scriptural focus. 
We do not believe that we can secure that 
focus by looking upon the character of 
Christ as a merely human ideal. The might 
of the scriptural emphasis is that Christ is the 
revelation of God. We are well aware that 
ordinary theological debate has centered on 
the question as to the extent to which Christ 
is like God. The Bible is colored with the 
belief that God is like Christ. This may 
seem at first glimpse to be a very fine dis- 
101 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

crimination, but the importance of that dis- 
crimination appears when we reflect that 
mankind is more eager to learn the char- 
acter of God than to learn how far a man 
can climb toward divinity. In all such dis- 
cussions as this we proceed at peril of being 
misunderstood, but we must repeatedly af- 
firm that important as is the problem as to 
the human ideal set forth in Christ, the divine 
ideal set forth in him is more significant as 
explaining the hold of the Bible on men. 

Is it not sufficient for us to behold a lofty 
human ideal in the portrait of Christ without 
such emphasis on this ideal as also a revela- 
tion of the divine character? The answer de- 
pends upon what we are most interested in. 
If we care most for a perfect and symmet- 
rical human life, we reply that we find that 
perfection and symmetry in Christ. In our 
second chapter we laid such stress upon the 
importance of the enlarging human ideal that 
we have committed ourselves to the im- 
portance of the Christ ideal as a revelation 
of the possibilities of human life. But if we 
take that ideal in itself without any refer- 
ence to the character of God, how much en- 
102 



THE BOOK OF CHRIST 

largement does it bring us ? As members of 
the human race we can indeed be proud that 
a human being has climbed to such moral stat- 
ure as did Jesus, but what promise does that 
give that any other human being can attain 
to his stature? As a member of the human 
race I can be profoundly thankful for a phi- 
losopher like Kant. I can, indeed, dedicate 
myself to the study of the Kantian philos- 
ophy with some hope of mastering it. I can 
seek to reproduce in my life all the condi- 
tions that surrounded the life of the great 
metaphysician, but I cannot hope to make 
myself a Kant. Strive as I may, such trans- 
formation is out of the question. I may at- 
tain great merit by my struggle, but I cannot 
make myself a Kant. The more intensely I 
might struggle, the more convinced I would 
become of the futility of my quest, and the 
genius of the philosopher might tower up at 
the end as itself a grim mockery of my ambi- 
tion. So it is with the Christ if he is not a 
revelation of the God life at the same time 
that he is an idealization of the human life. 
Viewed as a revelation of God's character the 
Christ life is the hope of all the ages. Viewed 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

only as a masterpiece of human life it might 
well be the despair of mankind. 

Of course there are those who believe that 
it is impossible for Christ to be a revelation 
of the human without also being a revelation 
of the Divine. We have no desire to quarrel 
with this position, though we find it more op- 
timistic than convincing. Incredible as it 
may seem at first thought, the universe might 
theoretically be regarded as a system ruled 
over by a Deity who had brought forth a 
character like that of Christ just for the sake 
of seeing what he could achieve in the way 
of a masterpiece, without being himself 
fundamentally involved in self-revelation. 
Christ might conceivably be a sort of poetic 
dream of the Almighty rather than a laying 
bare of the Almighty's own life. We find 
that human authors by an effort of great im- 
agination fashion creations in a sense com- 
pletely different from themselves. It might 
be theoretically urged that the character of 
Christ is different from the character of God. 
If this seems very far-fetched, let us remind 
ourselves then that there are those in the 
present world who conceive of Christ as the 
104 



THE BOOK OF CHRIST 

very highest peak of human existence and 
yet deny that he has any sort of significance 
as a revelation of the forces back of the 
world. Such thinkers maintain that Christ 
is the best the race has to show, and yet 
affirm that the race is but an insignificant 
item in the total massiveness of the universe. 
The Bible establishes the faith of men against 
skepticism like this by making the Christ- 
ideal for God himself so attractive and ap- 
pealing. 

There are those who proclaim that we do 
not need any revelations of God to make the 
human ideal fully significant — the human 
ideal stands by itself. Some such thinkers 
go consistently the full length of saying that 
they are willing to keep their eyes open to 
the hopelessness of the universe. They can 
see nothing beyond this life but total obliv- 
ion. Nevertheless, with their eyes open they 
will fight on manfully to the end and take the 
final leap into the dark without flinching. 
They are very apt to add that their philos- 
ophy is the only unselfish one ; that the desire 
of men for any sort of help from conceptions 
about the Divine is selfishness where it is not 
105 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

sentimentalism. It is fair to say that such 
doctrines seldom meet large response. The 
reason is not that men selfishly seek out a 
God for the sake of material reward that may 
come to them, but that they seek him for the 
sake of finding a resting place for their minds 
and souls, for the sake of cherishing an end 
which seems in itself worth while, for the sake 
of laying hold on a universe in which they 
can feel at home. If this is selfishness, then 
the activities of the human soul in its highest 
ranges are selfish. If it is selfish to long for 
a universe in which the heart can trust, it is 
selfish also to enjoy the self-satisfaction with 
which some of these thinkers profess to be 
ready to take their leap into the night. 

As we scan the history of Christianity since 
the day of the Founder we are impressed that 
religious organizations as such which arise 
within Christianity tend to survive in propor- 
tion as they make central the significance of 
Christ as the revealer of the character of 
God. We would not for a moment under- 
estimate the importance of those groups of 
Christians who take Christ merely as a 
prophet who lived the noblest life and ex- 
106 



THE BOOK OF CHRIST 

alted his truth by the noblest death. Many 
such believers manifest the very purest devo- 
tion to Christ. They are his disciples. But 
the historic fact is that organizations founded 
on such doctrines alone do not win sweeping 
triumphs. On their own statement the most 
they hope to do is to spread the leaven of 
their doctrine into the thinking of other 
groups of Christians. Their service in this 
respect is not to be disparaged, for at all 
times the more orthodox opinion of Christ, 
so called, needs the leavening of emphasis on 
the humanity of Christ. But after all these 
allowances it is just to affirm that theology 
which sees only the human in Christ does not 
come to vast power, and that clearly because 
the world is chiefly interested in the ques- 
tion with which the entire biblical revealing 
movement deals, namely, what is the nature 
of God? With that question answered we 
can best understand the nature of man and 
the possibility of communion between man 
and God. 

We may be permitted to pick up the 
thread of the argument in the last chapter 
and ask again what moral purposes rule the 
107 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

forces of this world. It must indeed be an 
odd type of mind that does not at least occa- 
sionally ask what this world is for, and what 
all this cosmic commotion is about. It is well 
for all of us to do the best we can without 
asking too many hard questions, but the 
queries will at times come up and with the 
normal human being they are not likely 
easily to down. We are in the midst of 
powers which defy our intellects. We do 
not go far in the attempt to read the secrets 
of nature around us without discovering that 
all we can hope to spell out is the stages by 
which things come to pass, and the mechan- 
isms by which they fit themselves together. 
Why they come to pass is beyond us, except 
in a most limited sense. The purposes for 
which events occur in this world are not self- 
evidently clear. Explanations of purposes 
only make matters worse; and at any mo- 
ment this problem of the mystery of the uni- 
verse may take personal significance in the 
form of a blow upon the individual which 
seems to mock all hope of anything worth 
while in human life. There is nothing more 
futile than the attempts even of ministers to 
108 



THE BOOK OF CHRIST 

divine the meanings of afflictions or of those 
inequalities of lot which attend the natural 
order. The preachers can encourage us to 
make the most of a bad lot, but their guesses 
as to why these things are ordinarily add 
to our burdens. No, the mind of itself 
just by contemplation of the things as 
they 'are cannot find much light. This enig- 
ma has always been before the philosophers 
in the form of the question as to physical suf- 
fering. A number of plausible answers 
have been made as to the reasons for pain 
in the present order. Leibnitz said that 
even the Almighty creating the finite world 
had to adjust himself to some limitations for 
the good of the whole ; that if some forces are 
to run in one direction, there must be mutual 
concession and compromise in the adjust- 
ment of manifold other activities; and that 
all this involves at least apparent stress and 
injustice at particular points. This sounds 
well enough, but why the afflictions of the 
individual who happens to be one of the par- 
ticular points should be just what they are is 
a mystery. The upshot is that the ordinary 
man — the plain man, as we call him — must 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

either give up the whole problem by seeking 
to forget it, or must rebel against it, or he 
must find relief in a God whom he can trust 
without being able to fathom his plans. 

The tragedy of physical affliction is light 
as compared to the tragedies which arise in 
any conscience which seeks to take moral 
duties seriously. To be sure, we live at pres- 
ent in a rather complacent age so far as the 
struggles of conscience are concerned. The 
advice of the world is to do the best we can 
and let the rest go. We are not to take our- 
selves too seriously. But the long moral ad- 
vances of the race have come through those 
who have taken the voices of conscience seri- 
ously. Now, what can a sensitive conscience 
make of moral duty? Assume that we have 
before us the exalted Christ ideal, and accept 
this as the guide of our lives — assume that we 
even have hope of some day attaining to that 
ideal — the distracting question is bound to 
jump at us: Are we doing enough? Have 
we sacrificed enough for those in worse plight 
than ourselves? And what about our past 
mistakes? Shall we go back and try to undo 
these? At the very best that might be like 
110 



THE BOOK OF CHRIST 

unraveling through the night what we have 
spun through the day. It will not do to dis- 
miss this as unhealthiness or morbidness of 
mind. William James has shown pretty con- 
clusively that the so-called normal or healthy- 
minded moral life is apt to be shallow. The 
great moral tragedy of the race is the dis- 
tance between the ideal and any possible at- 
tainment. We can console ourselves by say- 
ing that noble discontent is the glory of man ; 
but that does not get us far. There is 
only one way out, and that is to trust that 
we are dealing with a Christlike God, that 
his attitude toward us is the attitude of 
Jesus toward men. It is impossible to feel 
that in discipleship with Jesus men were 
complacent about their own moral perfec- 
tions on the one hand, or harassed with 
self-reproaches on the other. They were ad- 
vancing toward the realization of an ideal in 
companionship with One who not only in 
himself realized the human ideal, but who 
taught them that all the forces of the world 
would work together with them in their climb 
toward perfection, and that God would be 
patient with their blunders. 
Ill 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

The question as to the character of God be- 
comes more vital the longer we reflect. The 
growing conscience of our time demands 
that two conceptions be kept together — 
that of power and that of moral responsi- 
bility. We cannot hold a person responsible 
unless he has power ; we cannot give a person 
power unless he is willing to act under re- 
sponsibility. This realization is fast modify- 
ing all our relations to politics, to finance, to 
industry, even to private duties. We are 
swiftly moving toward the day when society 
will insist that any measure of power which 
has an outreach beyond the circle of the 
holder's personal affairs shall be acquiesced 
in by society only on condition that the holder 
of that power be willing definitely to assume 
responsibility to society. What we demand 
of men we demand also of God, and we have 
the scriptural warrant for believing that 
these human demands are themselves hints 
concerning the nature of God. Now, no one 
doubts the power of God. All scientific and 
philosophic trends are toward the centraliza- 
tion of power in some unitary source. All 
our study of nature and of society convinces 
112 



THE BOOK OF CHRIST 

us that there is a unity of power somewhere. 
If this be true, there must be raised with in- 
creasing persistence the question as to 
whether the World-Power is acting under a 
sense of moral responsibility. There were 
days when this problem was not raised as 
it is now. Men assumed for centuries that 
the king could do no wrong; that he could 
order his people about in the most arbitrary 
fashion. In our own time we have seen 
advocacy of the doctrine that the m'an of 
wealth is a law unto himself in the han- 
dling of the power that comes with wealth. 
Such mistakes never were really a part of the 
biblical idea. In shaping the threefold no- 
tion of priest and prophet and king to make 
the people familiar with the functions of 
God-sent leadership the strokes of emphasis 
always fell on the responsibility of the 
prophet to proclaim his message at whatever 
cost to himself, of the priest to keep in mind 
the sacredness of his office, and of the king 
to rule in righteousness. These demands 
were inevitably carried up to God: and in 
Christ the supreme effort is made to convince 
us that we can trust in the God of Christ, 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

though we may not be able to understand 
him. This is not the place for an attempt at 
determining the essentials of the Christ 
career. Some features of that life, however, 
as illustrating responsibility in the use of 
power can be hinted at here. Take the story 
of the temptation. We are not concerned 
now with the historic form in which the temp- 
tation occurred. After the historians have 
made all the changes in the drapery of the 
story they choose, the fact remains that the 
temptation narrative deals with the essential 
problems of any leader confronted with a 
task like that of Christ. The Messianic con- 
sciousness was a consciousness of power. 
How should the power be used? Should it 
be used to minister to human needs like those 
of hunger? That would promise a quick 
solution of a sort. The peoples would ea- 
gerly rally around the new deliverer. Should 
there be an attempt to utilize the political 
machinery of the time? There could be no 
doubt of the effectiveness of this plan. 
Should the exalted lofty spiritual state of the 
Master be relied upon to carry him through 
spectacular displays of extraordinary might 
114 



THE BOOK OF CHRIST 

that would capture the popular mind? Each 
of these suggestions presented its advan- 
tages. Each might have been rightfully fol- 
lowed by some one with less power than Jesus 
had; but for him any one of them would have 
involved a misuse of power, and hence he cast 
them all aside. 

The miracles reported of Christ have this 
for their peculiarity, that they show a power 
conceived of as divine used for a righteous 
purpose. It is significant that practically 
all the miracles described are those of healing 
or of relief. The kind of miracle that an 
irresponsible leader would have wrought is 
suggested by the advice of James and John 
to Jesus to call down fire on an inhospitable 
Samaritan village. The reported reply of 
Jesus, "Ye know not what spirit you are of," 
is the final comment on such use of power. 
Now, after we have made the most of the 
miracles recorded of Jesus, after we have 
made them seem just as extraordinary in 
themselves as possible, their most extraor- 
dinary feature is this use to which the power 
was put; and on the other hand, if we strip 
the miracles of everything that suggests 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

breach of natural law and make them just 
revelations of super-normal control over 
nature through laws like those whose exist- 
ence and significance we are beginning to 
glimpse to-day, still we cannot empty these 
narratives of their significance as revealing a 
morally responsible use of force. Let us be 
just as orthodox as we can, the purpose of 
the use of the forces is the supreme miracle ; 
let us be just as destructively radical as we 
please, we cannot eliminate from the Scrip- 
tures this impression of Christ as one who 
used power with a sense of responsibility. 
This revelation is one which the ages have al- 
ways desired. 

We must be careful to keep in mind the 
connection of the Christ life with what came 
before it and what has proceeded from it. 
Here we have the advantage which comes of 
regarding the Bible as the result of a process 
running through the centuries. If the Bible 
were not a library, but only a single book, 
written at a particular time, we might well be 
attracted by the nobility of its teachings, but 
might despair of ever making the teachings 
effective. There is no proving in syllogistic 
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THE BOOK OF CHRIST 

fashion that Jesus was what he claimed to be, 
or that he was what his disciples thought of 
him as being; but when we see a massive re- 
vealing movement centering on the idea of 
God as revealed in Christ, when we see the 
acceptance of the spirit of Christ opening 
the path to communion with the Divine, and 
when we find increasing hosts of persons 
finding larger life in that approach to the 
Divine, we begin to discern the vast signifi- 
cance of the scriptural doctrine that in Christ 
we have the revelation of the Christlike God. 
In this discussion we have been careful to 
avoid the terms of formal and creedal ortho- 
doxy. This is not because the present writer 
is out of sympathy with these terms, but be- 
cause he is trying to keep to the main impres- 
sion produced by the New Testament. The 
fundamental scriptural fact is that in Jesus 
the early believers saw God; they came to 
rest in God as revealed in Christ. This is 
true of the picture of Christ in the earliest 
New Testament writings. Modern scholar- 
ship has not been able to find any documents 
of a time when the disciples did not think of 
Jesus as the revealer of God. If the disciples 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

had not thought of Jesus thus, they would 
have found little reason to write of him. 
Now the scriptural authors employ various 
terms to declare the unique intimacy of 
Christ with God. In these expositions Jew- 
ish and Greek and even Roman thought 
terms play their part. Passages like the 
opening sentences of the fourth Gospel, or 
like the great chapter in the Philippians, are 
always profoundly satisfying and suggestive 
in their interpretation of the fundamental 
fact, but that fundamental fact itself is the 
all-essential — that in Christ the New Testa- 
ment writers thought of themselves as having 
seen God, and as having gazed into the very 
depths of the spirit of the Father in heaven. 
Believing as we do, moreover, in the helpful- 
ness of the creedal statements of the church, 
we must nevertheless avow that such state- 
ments are secondary to the impression made 
upon the biblical writers by actual contact 
with the Christ. We must not lose . sight 
of the primacy of that impression as we study 
our Scriptures. We must not limit the glory 
of the impression itself by the limitations 
of some of the explanations which we 
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THE BOOK OF CHRIST 

undertake. Much harm has been done the 
understanding the Scriptures by speaking 
as if some of our creedal statements con- 
cerning Christ are themselves Scriptures! 
The scriptural Christ is greater than any 
creedal characterization of Christ thus far 
undertaken. 

Of recent years an attempt has been made 
to prove that no such person as Jesus ever 
existed. The attempt has proved futile, but 
it has had a significance altogether different 
from what the propounders of the theory in- 
tended. The original aim was to show the 
contradictions of the testimony concerning 
Jesus and the inadequacies of the testimony 
to his existence as an historical Person. The 
result has been to show that the real signifi- 
cance of the Christ life is not to be found in 
any particular utterance, or in any specific 
deed, but in the total impact that he made 
upon the consciousness of man as suggesting 
the immediate presence of the Divine. The 
quality of the Christ life satisfies us in the 
inner depths as bearing witness to the quality 
of the God life. We have no sympathy with 
the views of the critics just mentioned; but 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

we must say that no matter how the thought 
of God in Christ got abroad, no matter how 
mistaken our thought of the historical facts 
at the beginning of the Christian era, the be- 
lief in the Christlike God nevertheless did get 
abroad. There is no effacing that conception 
from the New Testament. No matter what 
detailed changes in the narrative itself radical 
criticism may think itself capable of making, 
the door was opened wide enough in the 
Christ for the divine light to stream through. 
We said in the last chapter that the most 
important feature of the biblical revelation 
is God himself. We must now say that the 
supreme fact about God is Christ. 



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CHAPTER VI 
THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

If the central feature of the Scriptures is 
their idea of God, and if the climax of the 
biblical revelation is Christ, the greatest fact 
about Christ from the point of view of the 
Bible is his cross. We say fact advisedly, for 
we are not dealing with the theories that have 
sprung up to interpret the meaning of the 
cross. We are trying to deal solely with the 
direct impressions which seem to have been 
made upon the scriptural writers as to the 
place of the cross in the revealing movement. 

We said in the last chapter that the Scrip- 
tures reach their climax in the doctrine that 
God is in Christ. The cross of Christ carries 
to most effective revelation the Christlike 
character of God. While we are not treating 
now the various creedal dogmas as to the 
person of Christ, we must not forget that 
those dogmas have essayed as part of their 
task the bringing of God close to men. The 
truth embodied in the text that the Lamb 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

was slain from the foundation of the world 
is essential to knowing the Scriptures. We 
have seen that even as a warrior Jehovah was 
thought of as willing to bear his part of 
the burdens of the chosen people. We have 
seen growing the idea that Jehovah was 
under moral obligation to carry through the 
uplifting work which he had begun. We 
have seen prophets attain to glimpses of the 
meaning of suffering for the divine life, and 
we have beheld the culmination in the suffer- 
ing of Christ. In those perplexing phrases 
of the creeds like, "Very God of very God," 
the aim of the church has been perfectly 
clear — to guard the scriptural idea that 
God was so truly in Christ that the suf- 
ferings of Christ were the sufferings of God. 
Even when least intelligible the pain of men 
becomes more easily borne if men can believe 
that in some real sense their pain is also the 
pain of God. That God is Christlike in ca- 
pacity to suffer is in itself a revelation of no 
small consequence. 

In the cross of Christ we see exalted with 
surpassing power the belief that God acts 
out of righteousness in his relation to the uni- 
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THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

verse and to men. It must needs be that 
Christ suffer. The writers seem unable to es- 
cape the conviction that they are beholding 
the working of divinely inevitable moral 
necessities. These moral obligations are 
not to be conceived of as external to God 
or imposed on him from outside of him- 
self. In the Scriptures they seem, rather, 
to be expressions of his own nature. When 
the writers of theories about the cross lay 
stress on those profound obligations of God 
toward moral law which must be discharged 
in the work of redemption, the Scriptural 
basis underneath such theories is the implica- 
tion that God, by the very fact of what he is, 
must act righteously. His power is not his 
own in such sense that he can act from arbi- 
trary or self -centered motives. The Judge 
of all the earth must do right, at whatever 
cost to himself. The Scriptures keep close to 
the thought of God as a supremely powerful 
Being under supreme responsibility in the 
use of his power. If we can believe the 
Scripture that in Christ we see God, and 
that the bearing of Christ during his suffer- 
ing reveals really and uniquely the bearing 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

of God himself, we have a revelation of the 
grasp with which moral responsibility holds 
the Almighty against even any momentary 
slip into arbitrariness. Sometimes we hear 
the sufferings of Christ preached as a pattern 
of nonresistance for men. It is permissible 
thus to interpret the cross within limitations ; 
but this is not the essential aspect of the cross, 
as explaining its hold on men. The all-im- 
portant doctrine as to the use of power is 
hinted at in the Master's word that he had 
but to call for legions of angels if he so chose. 
Under most extreme provocation the forces 
of the Almighty held to their appointed task. 
If the Almighty had been conceived of as a 
Despot or an Egotist, he would have been 
expected to resort at once to revengeful vio- 
lence in the presence of such insults as those 
of the persecutors of the Son of God. The 
Source of all activity can hardly be conceived 
of as passive ; but the passivity of the Christ 
of the cross suggests that no outrage by men 
can divert the almighty power from its moral 
purpose. This is really a gathering together 
and lifting on high of the doctrine of the 
Sermon on the Mount, that God maketh the 
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THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

sun to shine upon the just and the unjust, 
and causeth his rain to fall on the evil and 
the good. That is to say, while the Bible 
thinks of the cross as laying bare the Al- 
mighty's reaction against evil, it also thinks 
of that cross as showing a God who will not 
be disturbed by any merely "personal" con- 
siderations. We behold the Almighty's use 
of power for the advance of a moral king- 
dom. The Almighty is set before us as ex- 
erting all his power for the relief of men. 
The cross makes the profoundest revelation 
of the moral fixedness and self-control of 
God so long as we hold to the scriptural rep- 
resentation. It is to be regretted that many 
theological theories break away from the 
Scripture basis and build upon assumptions 
which are artificial, not to say unmoral: or, 
rather, in their striving after system they get 
away from the atmosphere of moral sug- 
gestiveness with which the Gospels and Epis- 
tles surround the cross. 

That God will do his part in the redemp- 
tion of men is set before us in the cross. 
That part can be nothing short of making 
men yearn to be like Christ and of aiding 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

them in their struggle for the Christlike char- 
acter. It will be remembered that in the last 
chapter we called attention to the hopeless- 
ness of the Christian ideal viewed as an ideal 
in itself without a dynamic to help men to 
realize the ideal. If Christ is only to reveal 
to us the character toward which men are to 
strive, we are in despair. That one man has 
reached such perfection is in itself no promise 
that other men may reach that perfection. 
Moreover, the excellence of Christ is not only 
a moral excellence ;or if it is moral excellence, 
that excellence involves a balance of intellec- 
tual attributes which is for us practically out 
of reach. Now, Christ is the ideal, but the 
ideal is one toward which we not only labor 
in our own strength, but one whose attain- 
ment by us is an object of solicitude for God 
himself. And so we see in the cross a pa- 
tience which will bear with men to the ut- 
most, and which will reenf orce them as they 
press toward the goal. The glory of Chris- 
tianity is largely in the paradox that it sets 
before men an unattainable ideal and then 
commands them to attain the ideal. If the 
cross is nothing but a revelation of an ideal 
126 



THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

for men, this paradox is insoluble and intoler- 
able. In the scriptural light of the cross, 
however, we catch the glory not of an ab- 
stract ideal, but of a Father's love for his 
children — not of the commands of conscience 
in the abstract, but of the desires of a per- 
sonal Friend who will lift men as they 
stumble and fall. The ground for this pa- 
tience seems as we read to be in the very na- 
ture of God himself. God has brought men 
into this world without consulting them, he 
has dowered them with the terrific boon of 
freedom, he has set them in hard places ; but 
he has done this out of a moral and loving 
purpose. He therefore makes more allow- 
ances for men than exacting men ever can 
make for themselves. He puts at the service 
of men so much of his power as they can 
appropriate by their moral effort. The 
Christ of the cross is taught as the truth 
about God — the God who is at once the 
supremely real and the supremely ideal 
places his powers at the service of men who 
would make their Christ-ideal progressively 
real in themselves. 

The power of the Bible over men centers 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

around the teaching that the cross not only 
reveals God as morally bound to redeem men, 
but that it also shows us the divine aim in 
redemption. Men are to be redeemed by 
seeking for forgiveness in the name of the 
moral life set on high by the cross, but 
the repentant soul is to show its sincerity 
by devotion to the task and spirit of cross- 
bearing. The aim of the cross is to bring 
men together into a fellowship of the cross, 
in a fellowship of suffering for the sake 
of the moral triumph to be won at the 
end. We are accustomed to think of suffer- 
ing as implying the possibility of joy. The 
man who can feel keen sorrow can feel keen 
joy; they who have the power to weep have 
also the power to laugh. In the final king- 
dom the weeping shall be turned into joy. 
But, according to the Scriptures, it is not 
necessary for the disciples to wait until the 
consummation before entering into the joy 
of their Lord. There is an entrance to the 
divine mind through bearing the cross. 
Those who desired to learn of Christ as true 
disciples were expected to take up the cross 
and carry it daily. The Master also declared 
128 



THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

that the disciples were to think of themselves 
as blessed when they endured persecution for 
righteousness' sake, for men had persecuted 
the prophets in all ages. The implication is 
that knowledge of 'and sympathy with the 
prophets came out of cross-bearing like that 
of the prophets. To use a simple illustra- 
tion: a student of the careers of the leaders 
of any reform might gather a mass of in- 
formation about the reformers in an outside 
kind of fashion, as by the study of books, or 
by visits to the scenes of their struggles. 
Such a student, however, could not master 
the inner spirit of a reformer's life until he 
himself had battled for some cause at risk to 
himself. So the man who seeks to bear the 
cross of Christ is on the path to sympathetic 
inner knowledge of the spirit of Christ. In 
our second chapter we called attention to the 
truth that approach to knowledge of God is 
through the doing of the will of God. Doing 
of the will, according to Jesus, means much 
more than just a round of good deeds. It 
means carrying the burdens which are inevi- 
table in cross-bearing. There is good reason 
for believing that the very highest step in 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

spiritual learning is taken only through the 
willingness to bear the cross. In our modern 
educational systems we lay varying degrees 
of stress upon the importance of different 
methods of acquiring knowledge. There is 
at the bottom of the scale the method of 
mastering the instruction of the teacher by 
attention and reflection. There is, next, the 
method of learning through one's own ex- 
periment — through using microscope or tele- 
scope or textbook for oneself. There are, 
further, the social aids to the quickening of 
the mind as groups of students study and dis- 
cuss together. But the deepest knowledge 
comes as the student feels his sympathy and 
feeling involved. If he must pay himself out 
for the acquisition of the truth, or if he must 
defend his conclusions at great cost to him- 
self, this experience which involves the feel- 
ing involves also the sharpening of the intel- 
lect. The eyes of the soul are opened to the 
subtler intuitions. Thus it is in the revela- 
tions of the divine purpose in the Scriptures. 
It is hard to make out how anybody can hope 
to master a revelation of a cross-bearing 
God without himself being a cross-bearer. 
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THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

In the New Testament narratives of Pas- 
sion Week the Master is reported as win- 
ning his surest convictions of the presence of 
God and of the victory of his truth at the 
very instant when he entered into the ex- 
treme depths of suffering. In the after days 
it was when the saints faced stoning that they 
saw the heavens opening; it was the apostle 
who had suffered hardships almost too nu- 
merous to mention who got the most positive 
conviction of the reward which awaited him. 
In the school of Christ the very heaviest 
stress must fall upon the indispensability of 
cross-bearing as a means to understanding. 

Not only does the biblical revelation see 
in the cross of Christ the culminating mani- 
festation of the character of God, and of the 
purpose of God in redemption, but it also 
shows to us the divine method in helping 
men. We have spoken of those who dwell 
upon the Master's nonresistance as a model 
of passivity in the presence of evil. The ex- 
ample of Christ when thus treated is in 
danger of being misinterpreted. The Christ 
of the cross was passive so far as physical 
force was concerned ; but he was never more 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

intensely active in the higher ranges of his 
faculties — in self-control and in alertness to 
the finer whisperings of the spirit. The 
Christ's non-resistance to the physical might 
of evil is not to be interpreted as acquiescence 
on the part of the Divine toward the ravages 
of evil, but, rather, as the divine method of 
thwarting evil by allowing it to reveal itself. 
No amount of preaching about the nature of 
evil can equal in eloquence the self -revela- 
tions of that nature as it works itself out into 
expression. While in a degree the self- 
revelation of evil put forth against Christ 
was unique, yet we must remember that the 
sins which put Christ to death are just those 
commonest in all time. Judas was disap- 
pointed. He carried spite no more tena- 
ciously than the ordinary heart is capable of 
treasuring it. Caiaphas desired simply to 
hold his own position and preserve the peace 
of his nation. Very likely the type of opin- 
ion in the midst of which Caiaphas moved 
would have pronounced that he rendered a 
disagreeable, but nevertheless necessary pa- 
triotic service in his condemnation of Christ. 
Pilate too meant well, but was afraid of the 
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THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

crowd. His friends may have commended 
his administrative wisdom in allowing the 
people to have their own way. It was the 
play of just such ordinary forces of sin 
against an extraordinary holiness that made 
it impossible for the mightiest revelation ever 
vouchsafed to man to work through the 
earthly activity of Jesus for more than a few 
months. The Scripture does not have much 
to do with abstract sins ; with concrete sins of 
men as we actually find them, it has much 
to do. 

The Scriptures make it very clear that 
there is something which satisfies God him- 
self in the work of redemption. God acts out 
of moral obligation, out of self-respect, out 
of love. But he acts always in respect for 
men as free moral beings. The cross appeals 
to the free spirit of men to behold the nature 
of evil, and to flee from that evil toward their 
redeeming God. If the redemption is to be 
a moral redemption, the last detail of the 
method must be moral. The power of the 
Almighty must not be used to break down 
freedom of men. It would be theoretically 
possible for an almighty power to bring to 
133 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

bear such pressures upon human wills as to 
crush them, but the strongest representation 
of the power of God in the New Testament 
does not go to the length of hinting at inter- 
ference with the freedom of men. Men are 
to be saved as free men or not at all. We 
might conceivably imagine the Almighty as 
granting such indubitable vision of the mate- 
rial rewards of righteousness and the mate- 
rial loss of unrighteousness as would irre- 
sistibly draw masses of a certain grade of 
men into the Kingdom without a morally 
free consent to righteousness. Or we might 
conceive of the Almighty as so weighing this 
or that factor of environment as to diminish 
almost to the vanishing point the free choice 
of men. This kind of compulsion would not 
be moral. The only compulsions of the cross 
are those of a moral God splendidly attrac- 
tive on his own account. 

It will have occurred to some readers by 
this time that we have said very little about 
the love of God in our discussion of the 
Scriptures, whereas that love is the outstand- 
ing feature of the biblical revelation. Our 
reply is that we have been trying to be true to 
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THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

the impression made by the Scriptures as to 
the kind of love which we must think of as 
expressing the deepest fact in God's life. We 
would not in the least minimize the truth that 
love is the last word of the scriptural revela- 
tion ; but in our modern life we are apt to get 
away from the quality of the love revealed in 
the Bible. The love of the cross is built upon 
the righteousness which runs through the 
Sacred Book from the beginning to the end. 
A god of indifferent moral quality might 
love. The old Greek gods had favorites upon 
whom they lavished their affections. A god 
might be conceived of as an amiable and well- 
wishing father, foolishly indulgent toward 
his children. The love of the New Testa- 
ment, however, is the love of a Father who 
dares to appeal to the children to make heroic 
response; and who shows his own love for 
them in the lengths to which he will go for 
them. Moral love will go the full length of 
heroic self-sacrifice. We cannot help believ- 
ing that it is the quality of God's love, rather 
than the mere fact of that love, which is the 
explanation of the power of the biblical 
teaching. 

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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

A friend of mine many years ago wrote a 
book which he called The Hero God. The 
publishers objected to the title because they 
saw in it a touch of sensationalism. No title, 
however, could have more adequately set 
forth the biblical God. God is the hero of the 
Bible. His heroism appears in growing 
revelation from the beginning. It shows 
itself superbly in his willingness to bear the 
burdens of mankind and in the appeals which 
he makes for response from men. The pic- 
ture is of a God who dares to believe in men 
and who dares to call on them for the ex- 
tremes of self-sacrificing devotion, not to 
himself as an arbitrary Person, but to him- 
self as the center of the moral life which is 
above all other life worth while. It is open 
to anyone to object that this biblical picture 
does not necessarily hold good for God; but 
it is hardly possible to object that the picture 
is not biblical. The picture stands in its own 
right and makes its own appeal. The only 
way to test it in life is to yield to its 
appeal. 

If we are asked to account for the power 
of the Bible, we are at a loss for any one 
136 



THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

single statement. The most compendious 
reply is the magnetism of the love of God 
as revealed in Christ. This is so broad, 
however, that it may not make a direct 
and vivid impression. We may say, then, 
that one element of the magnetism of the bib- 
lical revelation is the magnetism of the 
appeal to the heroic. Whatever else the 
Bible may or may not be, it is not a book of 
soft and easy things. Breaths of the most 
rigorous life blow across every page. It is 
made for man in that it calls men to the 
service of the highest and best. The religious 
systems which make the fewest and least de- 
mands upon their followers most speedily fall 
away ; those that call for the utmost are most 
likely to meet the enthusiastic response. 
There is a frank honesty about the biblical 
appeal which holds a charm for all men in 
whom there are any sparks of real manhood. 
The severities of the Christian life are no- 
where disguised. Men are never lured on by 
false pretenses. The path is the path of cross- 
bearing, and the reward is the comradeship 
between God and man as they together work 
toward the highest goal, a comradeship which 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

of itself brings relief to men burdened with 
the mystery of the universe and agonized by 
remorse over sin. 

This essay is quite as significant for what 
it has not said as for what it has said. In our 
omissions we have tried to keep clear the 
main outlines of scriptural revelation. We 
have sought to hold fast to principles rather 
than to discuss details. We have done this 
because we have believed that there is more 
value for religious understanding in pointing 
out the loftier biblical peaks which give the 
direction of the whole range than in tracing 
out pathways through detailed passages. 
Moreover, we have been afraid to employ 
many theoretical terms lest we blur the quick 
moral impressions made by the Scripture 
phrasings. For example, it may be objected 
that our treatment of the character of God is 
altogether inadequate. We have not thus 
far said a word about the Trinity, for ex- 
ample, or about atonement. The reason is 
that we believe that any theories about God 
must base themselves upon the moral sugges- 
tions of the Scriptures; and our business is 
with these rather than with the theories. 
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THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

The received revelation concerning God 
would warrant us in fashioning any theory as 
to the richness of his inner constitution which 
might even measurably satisfy our minds. 
The scriptural atmosphere as to the moral 
life in God must, however, be kept in the 
chief place in all of our theological theories. 
Atonement must be interpreted chiefly in 
terms of ethical steadiness if it is to build on 
a biblical foundation. But the instant we use 
formal terms like "Trinity" and "atone- 
ment" we have taken at least one step away 
from the Scriptures. Again, we have said 
nothing about Divine Providence. The 
Bible is full of instances of providences, but 
here also we have preferred to let the funda- 
mental moral character of the biblical God 
speak for itself. We may have our own be- 
lief that there is no scriptural warrant for 
that separation which obtains in much theol- 
ogy between the processes of God and the 
processes of nature. We may admit that the 
Hebrew had no very systematically framed 
theory of the processes of nature, but he 
deemed God to be in such close touch with 
nature as easily to control its forces for a 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

good end. In two accounts of the crossing 
of the Red Sea by the Israelites we have an 
apparent contradiction which is at bottom 
not a contradiction. In one account God 
seems to cause the waters to wall up on both 
sides of the Israelites in defiance of the laws 
of nature. In another God accomplishes the 
drying of the path through the blowing of a 
strong east wind. The Hebrew would not 
have troubled himself much with the appar- 
ent contradiction, for he would have con- 
ceived of God as the chief factor in either 
event, and of his purpose as having the right 
of way. There is thus no great value in dis- 
cussing specific instances as long as the care 
of God for his children is the animating pur- 
pose of the entire biblical content. So with 
answers to prayer — the God who is willing to 
go for men to the lengths revealed in the 
cross will surely answer any prayer worth 
answering. The essential is to lift prayer up 
into harmony with the entire revealing and 
redeeming movement, and to conceive of it 
as a fitting of the whole life into the purposes 
of a moral God. Certain general require- 
ments would always have to be met. Prayer 
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THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

would have really to deal with what is best 
for the individual, best for those around him, 
and most in harmony with the character of 
God himself. So, again, with the progress 
of the kingdom of God on earth — the God of 
whose nature the cross is the final revela- 
tion can be trusted to do the best possible 
for the Kingdom here and now. Much 
debate about the second coming of Christ 
misses the great moral principles which 
are the heart of the Christian revelation 
and loses itself in the incidental forms in 
which those principles were declared. The 
best preparation for the coming of the king- 
dom of Christ is absorption in the principles 
of Christ and in the spirit of Christ. To get 
away from these in our search for external 
and material conditions which are the mere 
vehicle of the biblical thought is not only to 
pursue a will-o'-the-wisp, but to injure true 
spiritual progress. Jesus has given us the 
spiritual principles which must control the 
destiny of any society here and now. In the 
light of the Christ-faith revealed in the cross 
we must not despair of the redemption of 
men by the cityfull and by the nationfull, 
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UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

for the greatest confidence ever placed in men 
is the implied trust of the cross of Christ. 
The Almighty at the beginning paid an im- 
mense tribute to the human race when he 
flung it out into the gale of this existence. 
In the light of the cross we cannot believe 
that He expected the race to sink. In the 
cross the Christ who revealed God's own 
mind showed the length he was willing to 
go in confidence that men would finally turn 
to him with all the powers of their lives. To 
throw up our hands and say that the world is 
getting worse and we can do nothing without 
a speedy physical return of the Christ is to 
overlook the spiritual forces of the cross. 

We have said nothing about immortality. 
What the Scriptures themselves say is 
largely incidental. The Master did not allow 
himself to be drawn into any extended con- 
versation about the details of a future life, 
but he did give us the God of the cross. In 
the presence of that cross we can profess the 
utmost confidence in the eternal life of the 
sons of God, while at the same time acknowl- 
edging the utmost ignorance as to any of the 
material conditions of the future life. It is 
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THE BOOK OF THE CROSS 

commonly assumed that the resurrection of 
Christ proves that we shall likewise rise, but 
the rising of Christ does not of itself prove 
that others shall rise. The cross, however — 
showing the extent to which the Divine is 
willing to go for men — is the ground of our 
hope. God will not leave his loved ones to 
see corruption. In a word, the cross of 
Christ gathers up all the biblical truth. It is 
a revelation of God's own character, of his 
hope for men, of the methods by which he 
seeks to win men, and of the ground of our 
faith in a right outcome for men and for 
society. 

We may be permitted to summarize by 
saying that scientific and historical biblical 
study is a preparation for the knowledge of 
the Scriptures; that it is exceedingly impor- 
tant that the student approach with the cor- 
rect preliminary point of view. The revela- 
tion of the inner significance, however, does 
not dawn until there is recognition of the 
need of obedience to the principles laid down 
in the Scriptures. And this obedience must 
be broad enough to include zeal for the uplift 
of our fellow men in all phases of their lives. 
143 



UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 

Out of righteous living the devoted life, we 
believe, will see that the greatest fact of the 
Bible is God; that the greatest fact of God is 
Christ ; that the greatest fact of Christ is the 
cross. 



144 



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